John Gower. Confessio Amantis, 3 vols.

Review

When I reviewed the first volume of Peck’s new edition of CA for JGN in 2001, I welcomed the opportunity that it gave to teach the poem in entire books rather than just selections, and I praised the choice to put the Prologue, Book 1, and Book 8 together in one volume as an ingenious solution to the problem of presenting the poem to beginners. I also commended Andrew Galloway’s translations of the complete Latin apparatus. But I had a few reservations. I pointed out the incomplete and to some extent misleading account of the presentation of the text; I felt that Peck could have done a lot more to update Macaulay’s punctuation; and I felt that he gave an overly directive reading of the poem in place of a real introduction. The completion of the edition with the appearance of volume 3 offers a chance to reassess both the scheme as a whole and the details of its execution. In some respects the edition has improved as it progressed. There is evidence of much greater care in the preparation of the text, and there are, for instance, more textual notes in vols. 2 and 3 than appeared in vol. 1, and they are far more detailed. There is still, however, no good account of the editorial procedure, a problem that is now only exacerbated by the inconsistencies between the first and the subsequent volumes. Peck claims to have used the Fairfax MS as his “copy text? (3:485) and to have “consulted? (3:33) six others (Macaulay’s A, B, C, J, S, and T). This is a different list from vol. 1 (which does not cite C or T, but includes Delta), and it is not clear what Peck means by “consulted,? since A, C, and T are cited far less often in the notes than B, J, and S. Even with these latter copies, the notes do not offer a complete record of variants. (Macaulay’s notes offer a much fuller selection.) The emphasis is on departures from Macaulay: in vol. 3 alone there are 42 instances in which Peck follows F where Macaulay chooses to follow a different MS; 17 instances in which Peck follows F where Macaulay’s different reading has no evident MS support (These are evidently Macaulay’s errors of transcription. All are very minor. They include 5.5918, where the note is incorrect.); and 19 instances in which Peck follows Macaulay in departing from F. At least Peck has provided the MS authority for his departures from Macaulay or from F (one of the issues that I had with vol. 1), though he still does not explain what principles guided his choice. (His understanding of the relation among the surviving copies appears to be based only on Macaulay and Fisher; see 3.33.) The text itself appears reasonably accurate. I checked a passage of a little less than 400 lines (5.2859-3246) against both Macaulay and my photocopy of F. I found one instance where Peck follows Macaulay in error (my for mi in 5.2939) and one new mistake (him where Macaulay and F have hem, 5.2884). This is pretty small stuff, on about the same level as the errors that Peck found in Macaulay. I also found that Peck has modernized the capitalization and some of the spelling in his text, following the normal practice for TEAMS editions, and that he has also taken far more liberty with Macaulay’s punctuation than he did in vol. 1, making at least two dozen changes in the passage that I examined. These are welcome, but again I wish he had done more, and there are at least another dozen passages in which I feel that no modern editor, beginning fresh, would have chosen the punctuation that Macaulay did. Again, not a major problem, but it does lead me to the same conclusion that I reached with vol. 1: that Peck’s “copy text? was not Fairfax at all but Macaulay, which he has read against F and some other copies and which he has modernized a bit. This is actually not a new edition of the poem in the usual sense, and I think that Peck could have been a little clearer about it. The introductions to vols. 2 and 3 are very much in the mold of that to vol. 1. They offer us Peck’s reading of the poem. Amans is a lost sinner; the poem is “a study of the self’s effort to reclaim its own estate? (2:39); and Amans’ personal regeneration also has a political and social correlative, in the regeneration of the community. In vol. 2 Peck is somewhat hard-pressed to apply this understanding to Books 2 and 3 except in his discussion of individual tales (which he must treat in isolation from the dialogue), and in Book 4, it emerges only as an unexpressed and ironic counterpoint to what Genius and Amans actually say. In vol. 3 Peck has somewhat more to work with, as “Gower alters his earlier structural patterns to shift the focus from confession and impersonation to education – education in good rule? (3:1). Except in his discussion of the treatment of Chastity, however, there is little hint in the third introduction that the poem is actually concerned with love, and Peck arranges his discussion (as Gower does not) to conclude with the tale of Lycurgus and the importance of the rule of law. There is certainly much of value here: a good couple of pages on Nature in vol. 2, for instance, (2:14-17) (though I find the preceding discussion of CA as “drama? to be heavy with anachronism), and some good comments on the folkloric aspect of CA and on the range of Gower’s style in vol. 3 (3:10-15). But overall, Peck has evidently viewed this edition as an opportunity to espouse the same view of the thematic structure of the poem that he has argued for since 1968. Whether or not I agree with this view is unimportant (just for the record: I don’t); what is at issue is whether or not this is an appropriate function for the introductions in an edition that is intended for beginners. I see another missed opportunity here. Not only does Peck close off discussion of such issues as the roles of Genius and Amans (What really does happen in the conclusion? For a view very different from Peck’s, students should be directed to Burrow (1983).), but some of the best of the recent writers on Gower have opened up the poem in ways that couldn’t have been anticipated when Peck and I first studied it, and some have challenged both the necessity and the possibility of a single consistent moral message from beginning to end. Except in his discussion of Nature, however, Peck never acknowledges them. By being a little less prescriptive, by focusing a little more on what still must be regarded as unresolved issues in the reading of the poem, Peck could have done quite a bit more to prepare the way for the next generation of Gower scholars. Having studied the poem for so long, Peck certainly knows it very well, and there is therefore much of value in the explanatory notes, particularly, I feel, in Book 7. And I must say once again what a fine job Andrew Galloway has done with the Latin apparatus. (Note to the publisher: half of the translation to the gloss at 5.4579 was inadvertently left out.) The notes also record Galloway’s discovery that the twelve Latin glosses to the discussion of the signs of the zodiac in Book 7 are metrically regular and together constitute a “Latin poem on the seasons? (3:449); to which I can add that the second of these, at 7.1015, contains a typically Gowerian quotation of Ovid’s Fasti 3.240, the best evidence that I know of that Gower himself actually composed at least some of the glosses to the poem. As for the overall scheme of the edition: it appears to me now that if the original plan was to make each volume independent, it has not been carried out consistently, and if it was not, then there was perhaps much less reason for presenting the poem out of chronological order and placing Book 8 in vol. 1. Vol. 3 contains a subject index (a list of characters and topics) to all three volumes, suggesting that they constitute a single work. Peck seems to have thought of his three introductions as parts of a single composition, and indeed his discussions of such topics as Nature or law are as relevant to any of the volumes as to the volume in which they occur, and his own argument on the structure of the poem depends heavily on reading Book 7 before Book 8. Those who use vol. 1 alone are going to receive a very partial, very incomplete view of the poem, and those who use the complete edition will now have a rather disjointed view. I’m afraid that moving Book 8 to vol. 1 seems much less of a good idea now that the edition is complete than it seemed at the beginning. In sum: this is a very attractive and usable edition of the complete text of the Confessio Amantis; it has some very important features (notably Galloway’s translations); and it is very affordable. We have to be glad to have it. But it also has its quirks, notably its arrangement; as a guide to reading the poem, it has to be used with great care; and in several important ways, it leaves me thinking about what might have been. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1]