Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis

Between 1898 and 1902 G. C. Macaulay produced his impressive edition of the works of John Gower. For a long time the volumes dealing with the Confessio Amantis have stood unassailable. However, in the past decades it has become ever clearer that his assumptions and deductions about the Confessio Amantis are much less solid than he and his disciple John Hurt Fisher believed. As Gower scholarship at large has continued to pay lip-service to many of his ideas, this article seeks to redress the situation by reviewing Macaulay in the light of recent thinking, which calls for due consideration of the political situation of the times and the possibility of manuscript tampering in compliance with Henry IV’s new regime. Its conclusions indicate serious errors of judgment on Macaulay’s part, including unreliable dating, faulty assumptions for his three-recension indexation of the manuscripts, and a considerable disregard of the political complexities involved.