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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2024
Gower, Confessio Amantis, with Latin concluding material, Traitié, and three Latin poems
s.xv, end of first quarter
This description is partly derived and occasionally quoted from the brief description of the Wollaton Hall MS by Ralph Hanna in Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (eds), The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers (York, 2010), 100–01, and the essay by Derek Pearsall, ‘The Wollaton Hall Gower Manuscript (WLC/LM/8) considered in the Context of Other Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis’, in the same volume, 57–67. We are grateful to the editors for permission to make use of their work.
Contents
1
(fols 1ra–200va) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 1–VIII.3172
Torpor hebes sensus, etc. (6 lines of Latin verse). Of hem þat written vs tofore < > Oure ioie may ben endeles. Amen
Prologue (fol. 1ra); Book I (fol. 7rb); Book II (fol. 27vb); Book III (fol. 48va); Book IV (fol. 64b); Book V (fol. 86va); Book VI (fol. 132rb); Book VII (fol. 146rb); Book VIII (fol. 181vb). There are nine lines blank at the foot of the final column of text (fol. 200va); fol. 200vb is blank but ruled.
Collated by Macaulay (ed., Works, II.clvi) (sigil Λ): Text II. He considers the MS to be very close to Bodley 294, especially items 2–7 below. The Wollaton MS has been claimed as source for part of Caxton’s print of the Confessio. For discussion, see N. F. Blake, ‘Caxton’s Copy-Text for Gower’s Confessio Amantis’, Anglia, 85 (1967), 282–93, reprinted in N. F. Blake, William Caxton and English Literary Culture (London, 1991), 187–98 (esp. 192–94).
For further information about the following Latin and French addenda that Gower caused to be added to MSS of the Confessio, see Appendix III.
2
(fol. 200va) ‘Explicit iste liber’
Explicit iste liber < > sub eo requiesce futurus
Later six-line version with dedication to the earl of Derby.
Macaulay (ed.), Works, III.478.
3
(fol. 200va) ‘Quam cinxere freta’, with preceding rubric ‘Epistola super huius’
Quam cinxere freta < > stat sine meta
Macaulay (ed.), Works, III.479.
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