Appendix III - Gower’s Latin Addenda to the Confessio and other pieces, not by Gower, that appear in Confessio Manuscripts

Summary

There are a number of Latin prose rubrics and short poems, as well as the French Traitié, that are associated closely with the Confessio and that appear regularly in MSS of the Confessio. Several of the poems deal with Gower’s main themes in the Confessio, such as love, marriage and moral law, and may be regarded as integral to his conception of his poem. There is a complete listing of the MSS in which each occurs in Pearsall, ‘Manuscripts and Illustrations’, and translations of all the Latin in R. F. Yeager (ed. and trans.), John Gower: The Minor Latin Works (Kalamazoo, MI, 2005). Nearly all complete MSS, that is, those that do not lack the end leaves where these pieces would appear, have the first three items, though a small number lack one or other of the first two. The remaining items, namely the Traitié and the Latin poems, appear in just eight MSS (Oxford, Wadham College, MS 13 has the French poem only), most of them de luxe copies: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, BL, MS Harley 3869, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294 and MS Fairfax 3, Nottingham UL, MS WLC/LM/8, Geneva, Bodmer MS CB 178, New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fa. 1, and Princeton UL, MS Taylor 5. For a full and illuminating discussion of the Latin at the end of the Confessio, see Siân Echard, ‘Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis’, in Richard Firth Green and Linne R. Mooney (eds), Interstices: Studies in Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A. G. Rigg (Toronto, 2004), 99–121, where there is also a useful chart of the end matter in all MSS of the Confessio and Vox.

1. Confessio Amantis

See Introduction. A few MSS have lists or partial lists of contents, as described in the Introduction (‘Additions’), and three of these (Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 213, New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS M.126, and Princeton UL, MS Taylor 5) appear in the MSS immediately before or after the Confessio and are listed in the MS descriptions under ‘Contents’.

2. ‘Explicit Iste Liber’

Latin verse, four lines in some MSS (Form A), six lines in others (Form B). The two extra lines add a dedication to Henry earl of Derby to Gower’s commendation of himself and his book.