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Full Description
Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio's material history and offers a major revision to a century's old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for "late stage" revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower's death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of the Confessio. It offers a reassessment of the political and literary relationships between versions dedicated to Richard II and Henry IV. It repositions Gower's laureate status in a London world of deluxe book production that created a canon of Ricardian poets linked to their fifteenth-century inheritors. Finally, it identifies for the first time how late medieval authors designed their poetry as fictional artifacts that witness history from quasi-chronicles like Maidstone's Concordia or Richard the Redeless, quasi-petitions like the Lollard "Petition to the King and Parliament," quasi-epistles that begin so many texts, quasi-transcripts such as the Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, and so on.
Contents
1 Introduction: Witness Without Locus.- 1 Reading Variation.- 2 Dream-Vision Variations.- 3 The Polyvocal Page.- 4 Prophet or Propagandist?.- 2 A Portrait in Laureate Authority.- 1 The Chaucer Problem.- 2 The Inheritors.- 3 Father Gower.- 3 Revising the Three-Recension Model.- 1 Macaulay's Model.- 2 Dates in the Confessio Glosses.- 3 The Quia Colophons.- 4 The Henrician Couplet.- 5 The Ricardian and Henrician Passages.- 6 Conclusion.- 4 Gower's Late State.- 1 The Nicholson Demolition.- 2 Finding New Language for a New King.- 3 The Late State Model.- 4 The Added Texts and the Two Presentations.- 5 Gower's Margins.- 6 The First Public Life of the Confessio and Its Decoration.- 1 The Manuscript Witnesses.- 2 A Brief Overview of the Developments in London Borders ca. 1400-1425.- 3 Early London Borders and Major Literary Manuscripts.- 7 Ricardian Confessio Manuscripts in Lancastrian England.- 1 An Emerging Producer Coterie in London, 1405-1410.- 2 London Manuscripts 1405-1410.- 3 London Manuscripts 1410-1415.- 4 The Confessio Boom Tails Off, 1415-1425.- 5 Conclusions.- 8 Binaries of Witness in the Languages of Love and Political Cognition.- 1 Witnessing Exile.- 2 Love and Politics.- 3 Reading the End of the Confessio as a Late-State Text.- 4 The Chaucer Connection.- 5 Enduring Forms of Witness.
