Most readers of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis are quite aware that there are multiple versions; the presence in both G. C. Macaulay’s and Russell A. Peck’s editions of alternative texts within the Prologue and Book 8 have left scholars with a clear sense of at least two distinct approaches, though the bulk of the long poem is reasonably stable across the manuscript tradition. Macaulay’s grouping of the versions of the text into three sequenced “recensions” set our initial understanding of the poet’s development, and generated persistent assumptions of the relative dating of Gower’s works. John H. Fisher’s John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (1965) further elaborated on Macaulay’s dating and sequencing, and thus a consensus was born. This consensus proposes that a younger Gower was an earnest supporter of Richard II, as shown by the boat scene and “A book for King Richardes sake” (Prol.*24) in the “first recension,” and that he shifted his allegiance to Henry IV and a “bok for Engelondes sake” (Prol.24), hence the Henrician details of the later “recensions.”
This consensus matters to Joel Fredell’s Fictions of Witness largely because much of the purpose of his book is to argue for an entirely different understanding of the different versions of the poem and their relative timing. Fredell has been working on this and related questions for years, including a number of articles about manuscript issues relating to Gower, and an earlier critique of the recension model on the basis of the manuscripts in a 2010 Viator article. What takes this book past the direct challenge to an expiring consensus, then, is his extended proposal of a compelling answer to the question of why there are Henrician and Ricardian versions of the poem, and what that understanding of the poem’s development means in terms of the poem’s dating, and more broadly its pivotal role in London manuscript culture around the turn of the fifteenth century.
The crux of the sequence and recension problem is that there are high-quality Henrician manuscripts that are actually earlier than high-quality Ricardian manuscripts, and there are not really any Confessio manuscripts that actually date from Richard’s reign--the mention of Richard’s sixteenth regnal year (1392/93) “may be a fiction generated at some point after that date” (88), and is not really enough to date any version of the poem. So the earliest surviving manuscripts seem to be Henrician, with “a major flowering of deluxe Ricardian Confessios emerging in London ca. 1405-1415” (96), well after Richard’s deposition. Fredell here emphasizes the conjectural nature of the recension model. While his own narrative has its own share of conjecture, it makes at least as much sense as Macaulay’s model, and he is able to martial considerable evidence and draw on significant recent work in manuscript studies to support his model of a “late state model” positing the distribution of the Confessio early in the reign of Henry IV, with the variants having been composed somewhat earlier.
Along the way to this overall theory of Gower’s poetic production, Fredell manages to cover a lot of critical ground. He starts by making it clear that his work will be largely based on careful analysis of extant manuscripts, rather than positing lost ones that match a reader’s sense of the internally-indicated chronology; a key to this move is the contention that the manuscripts may be presenting a fictive sense of their own context, the “fictions of witness” of his title. This analysis covers a lot of important ground, and starts to build a persistent contrast of the page layout patterns of the Henrician and Ricardian manuscript traditions, which have key differences. His next section then argues that using Chaucer manuscripts as our model to approaching Gower has chronological problems. While Fredell does not endorse the old idea of Gower overseeing a scriptorium focused on his own work, he does suggest more involvement on Gower’s part with his manuscripts than Chaucer seems to have had (much of this work taking place after Chaucer’s death), tying Gower’s practice more to Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s approaches--he sees this role as central to an ideal of “laureate poetry” (39) developing in the early fifteenth century. A close examination of the manuscript traditions for all of these authors helps him make his case for his model of manuscripts as authorial self-presentation.
From here he then digresses a bit into an overview of the recension problem; he has published on this previously, of course, and putting his material after he has established his attentive approach to the manuscript tradition helps reinforce that he is offering his own interpretation of the manuscript tradition rather than simply arguing with Macaulay and Fisher. He explores dates tied to the Confessio in glosses and colophons (as well as the 16 Richard II date mentioned above), but emphasizes that these can reasonably be understood as fictive rather than pinning down an actual date of composition. This discussion also includes a detailed comparison of the Ricardian and Henrician passages, suggesting that the internal date the poem offers for the Henrician material corresponds to a point where “things fell apart in England under Richard’s rule” (106).
This leads Fredell to present his “late state” model of Gower’s writing, pushing much of the work on both Vox Clamantis and Confessio Amantis to after the change in monarch, and interpreting many details from both texts in terms of the Henrician turn; he sees the Mirour de l’Omme as very much an outlier, the only poem with a significantly pre-1400 manuscript. Once he sets up this understanding of the overall sequence of Gower’s work (significantly different from the timeline proposed by Fisher following Macaulay), he then has to engage with the practical problem of closely dating medieval manuscripts--traditional dating methods tend to yield ranges of years, rather than exact seriation, but the tight timeline he is building here would benefit from a more than typical specificity. This leads him to a detailed analysis of manuscript layout and stylistic variation or development in marginal art, particularly in his subsequent analyses of marginal decoration and miniatures in early Confessio manuscripts. This section draws heavily on the work of Kathleen Scott as well as recent work on individual scribes by Linne Mooney, Estelle Stubbs, and others; this section is highly detailed and thoroughly illustrated, and he handles Lawrence Warner’s strong disagreement with Mooney and Stubbs deftly.
His next major section outlines his explanation for how Ricardian manuscripts came to be later than the earliest Henrician ones, by suggesting that a group of London scribes in the period from 1405-10 were deliberately creating a “Ricardian version” to go with deluxe editions of other contemporary poets (Chaucer, Langland, and Trevisa), to cater to a nostalgic sense of the Ricardian “court of love” from before the collapse of Richard’s rule leading to the usurpation. He is not entirely clear how the scribes would have managed to access the Ricardian verses for these copies of the Confessio, but while he is making some conjectures here, he is careful to acknowledge them. This section of the book can also serve as an effective introduction to scribal practice in the period, as it combines an array of literary texts with an array of identified scribes, and helps to make sense of broad patterns in manuscript production in this era. This section also draws on the use of miniatures, as in the previous section, and Fredell's chronology of manuscripts here is both well-illustrated and largely clear.
His final sections then shift into more literary interpretation, to make some critical hay out of his major work on relative dating and overall manuscript presentation. He engages in some depth with the end of the poem (which has its own textual variations), interpreting it in terms of his posited trajectory of Gower’s later poetic career. This does lead to one recurring quibble with his overall approach here--he largely accepts Lancastrian positions on Richard’s “tyranny,” and that understanding frames much of his analysis of how the poem is reacting to the two monarchs. He does not oversimplify (and his understanding of the limitations of Henry’s own reign comes through clearly), but given the overall approach of challenging previous assumptions, more skepticism of a usurper’s point of view and its effect on the sources might have been appropriate. Clearly “late state” Gower could be no Ricardian apologist, and Fredell makes an excellent case that we have no way of really knowing what Gower thought of Richard in the 1380s and early 1390s.
Ultimately this book covers a great deal of ground, and largely makes its case effectively. The use of color illustrations supports his focus on manuscript presentation, and they are well-incorporated into the text. Not every reader will agree with every contention Fredell makes here, but even if one does disagree, one will now have to engage with his point of view when making an argument about Gower’s dates of authorship or his relationships with his kings. Certainly Gower Studies as a whole seems to agree--this book very much deserved the John Gower Society’s John H. Fisher Prize, which it received in 2024, though given his sustained (if polite) disagreement with Fisher, that might be slightly ironic.