Confessio Amantis, Volume 1 (Middle English Texts) Paperback – May 1, 2006

Had to purchase for English Lit. Good book for the money. Hard to read...

While Middle English literature is/was/will be dominated by Chaucer, he was not the only major author of his time. What set Chaucer apart from his many contemporaries was an ironic distance from his material, a strong sense of himself as working within a larger European tradition, and a keen eye for what would later become realism. Outside of Chaucer, the prevailing naivete of his contemporaries is downright depressing, and one wonders if human beings evolved some extra part of their brain after his glorious rescue of the language.But let me attempt to be fair. Chaucer DID have several worthy contemporaries. One of them (who was at least his artistic equal and probably his better) was the Pearl Poet. The other was John Gower. Gower's poetry lacks a lot of the material that a modern reader will find compelling (humor and humanity, for instance) and offers instead moral improvement in the form of translated fables. As far as poetic artistry goes, Gower was a better metricist than Chaucer, and one can feel the smoothness of each line that, while lacking that particular Chaucerian clangor, is a virtue in itself. But material-wise, many readers (other than Medievalists--and even they may need to prop their eyelids open) will just find Gower dull.To some degree, Gower has simply not stood the test of time. Out of all of his works, we only read the Confessio now--his other French and Latin works have, for the most part, been forgotten. Moreover, the Confessio's moralistic tales do not always seem relevant to the current time. Need a piece of literature be relevant or applicable to life in order to be studied and written about? Certainly not, but if anything more is to be done with it (such as keeping it on one's shelf to be read in times of existential trouble, or simply to be read for pleasure), then it should not feel as dated as Gower does. His work, to a large degree, has perished, and one gets the sense of reading some "old, dead white guy" as opposed to hearing a living voice.It's always hard judging a book like Gower's, which was written such a long time ago for such a different milieu, on the terms of works that surpassed his own in the realm of imaginative literature. It is my opinion that what wisdom can be gained by reading the Confessio might more readily be gained (in greater abundance and profundity, no less) from reading The Canterbury Tales, or Troilus and Criseyde, or Gawain and the Green Knight, or Pearl, or the Parliament of Fowls, and so on. If you're a newcomer to Middle English lit, you may want to avoid Gower for now, and pick up one of the aforementioned texts.