The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on April 5, 2009
The Review of English Studies 2009 60(246):561-577; doi:10.1093/res/hgp019
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
Responses to the Frame Narrative of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scottish Literature
University of Nottingham
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Abstract |
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The manuscript and documentary evidence for the circulation of John Gower's poetry in late medieval and early modern Scotland indicates a continued interest in this English poet well into the sixteenth century. However, the nature of the literary responses made by Older Scots writers to John Gower's Confessio Amantis (c.1390–3) remains a neglected aspect of Anglo-Scottish literary relations in this period. This article demonstrates that Gower's English poem was regarded as an important part of the literary heritage of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish writers and that they engaged with it in a number of creative and subtle ways. Three Scottish responses to the frame narrative of the Confessio Amantis are explored in detail: that found in the anonymous prose treatise, The Spectacle of Luf (c.1492), that of Gavin Douglas in The Palice of Honour (c.1501), and that of John Rolland's in his The Court of Venus (c.1560?). Through echoing or reworking specific narrative episodes and images from the framing device of the Confessio Amantis, these texts draw attention to their authors’ understanding of the thematic concerns of the English poem, and signal the importance of Gower's ethical and moral project to writers concerned with advice giving in late medieval and early modern Scotland.