The Confessio Amantis was written between 1385 and 1408, the year in which John Gower the poet died, though he became increasingly blind from about 1402. It is in English, in octosyllabic couplets, like Chaucer’s translation of the Romance of the Rose, Book of the Duchess and House of Fame, and contains 33444 lines, divided into a Prologue of 1088 lines and eight books: Book I, 3446 lines; II, 3530 lines; III, 2774 lines; IV, 3712 lines; V, 7844 lines; VI, 2440 lines; VII, 5438 lines; VIII, 3172 lines. Book VIII has a ‘Supplicacioun’ by the Lover in twelve rhyme royal stanzas at 2217–2300. Macaulay’s line-numbering, which is used throughout this volume, is based on the text contained in his copy-text, Bodleian, MS Fairfax 3, which he takes to represent Gower’s final intentions for his poem; passages presumed to be superseded in revision are introduced at the foot of Macaulay’s printed page with alternative asterisked line-numbers. Macaulay’s line-numbering excludes the sets of Latin elegiac couplets that stand at the beginning of major text-divisions, or ‘chapters’, which are numbered by Macaulay in small Roman numbers. There are sixty-nine of these sets of verses, from two to twelve lines long, mostly quatrains, especially in the later books, and totalling 388 lines. There are also, at the head of many ‘chapters’ and shorter ‘paragraphs’, Latin prose glosses, often in the form of long moralising summaries of the narrative of Genius’s exemplary stories; these summaries, like the many short Latin glosses, notes and speech-markers, are placed in the margins in a dozen or so fine manuscripts of good authority, but in most manuscripts they are moved, with varying degrees of success, into the text-column. This Latin prose contributes considerably to the complex appearance of the poem and to its bulk, about the equivalent of 3000 lines when in the text-column.

Text

Macaulay distinguishes three forms of the text, which he calls the first, second and third recensions and associates with the chronological process of authorial revision. The first recension has the original form of the prologue (Prol. 24*–92*) and epilogue (VIII.2941*–3114*), both with favourable mention of Richard II, the former with the meeting on the Thames and the latter containing the eulogy of Chaucer;