Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Nature of Vernacular Ethics

Abstract

Due to the specialized focus of some of the best modern accounts of medieval moral thought, there has grown up a partial and distorted impression of its historical development, occluding the characteristic contingency of moral rhetoric, practical reason, and action.² The shortcomings of the leading studies have much to do with what is (or rather, is not) typically admitted as significant evidence for premodern ethical theory and moral psychology, since scholars typically draw their examples from university debates and tractates without taking into their purview literary works, sermon collections, confessional manuals, and various other—especially vernacular or demotic—sources. What view prevails as a result? The issue can be framed with reference to the legacy of Aristotelian ethics, chosen here for its particular relevance to texts discussed in this book. We have already looked at how Thomas Usk adapts neo-Aristotelian doctrine to sophisticated ends in Middle English. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis is another late fourteenth- century work in which Aristotle looms large in the vernacular, though in quite a different aspect: the seventh book expounds neo-Aristotelian theoretical, rhetorical, and political teachings, and in addition Gower employs exemplary rhetoric throughout the work in a way that comports well with an understanding of Aristotle’s moral particularism.³ And yet the English poet’s ethical pragmatism is regularly overlooked in histories of moral philosophy, leaving the impression that medieval morals were apodeictic not contingent.

Mundus in euentu versatur ut alea casu, Quan celer in ludis iactat auara manus. [The world is tossed by chance, as dice quickly thrown by greedy hands at play.] John Gower, Confessio Amantis¹