Confessio Amantis
Confessio Amantis ("The Lover's Confession") is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems. According to its prologue, it was composed at the request of Richard II. It stands with the works of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl poet as one of the great works of late 14th-century English literature. The Index of Middle English Verse shows that in the era before the printing press it was one of the most-often copied manuscripts (59 copies) along with Canterbury Tales (72 copies) and Piers Plowman (63 copies).
| Confessio Amantis | |
|---|---|
| by John Gower | |
The author and the Priest of Venus, from an MS of the Confessio Amantis ca. 1399 | |
| Original title | Confessio Amantis (The Lover's Confession) |
| Written | 1390 |
| Country | England |
| Language | Middle English |
| Meter | Octosyllable |
| Lines | 33,000 |
| Full text | |
| Confessio Amantis at Wikisource | |
In genre it is usually considered a poem of consolation, a medieval form inspired by Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and typified by works such as Pearl. Despite this, it is more usually studied alongside other tale collections with similar structures, such as the Decameron of Boccaccio, and particularly Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with which the Confessio has several stories in common.