27 - Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3

Summary

Confessio Amantis, with Latin poems and rubrics and the French Traitié London, s.xv, very early, or s.xiv, very late

Contents

1

(fol. 1) flyleaf, blank

(fol. 2ra–186v) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 1–VIII.3172 end

Torpor hebes sensus scola parua labor | minimusque, etc. (6 lines of Latin verse).

Of hem þat written vs | tofore < > Oure ioye may ben endeles

Prologue (fol. 2ra); Book I (fol. 8rb); Book II (fol. 27va); Book III (fol. 47va); Book IV (fol. 62rb); Book V (fol. 82va); Book VI (fol. 125va); Book VII (fol. 138vb, Latin; fol. 139ra, English); Book VIII (fol. 168vb).

The text has been extensively revised (see Macaulay [ed.], Works, II.clvi–clix; Nicholson, ‘Gower’s Revisions’, ‘Poet and Scribe’, and ‘Gower’s Manuscript’, and also with further invaluable help in private communications; M. B. Parkes, ‘Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower’, in Richard Beadle and A. J. Piper (eds), New Science out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle [Aldershot, 1995], 81–121, see esp. 89–90). Scribe 1 wrote the whole poem, fols 2r–185v, but fols 2 and 185 have been replaced. Scribe 2 wrote fol. 185, a leaf inserted in place of the one cut away, containing VIII.2967–3146, with the preceding twenty-nine lines (VIII.2938–66) copied in on fol. 184vb over the same number of lines erased. Scribe 3 wrote the first leaf of the text, to replace the one cut away, with Prologue 1–146, and also fols 186–94 (quires xxiv and xxv), including the last lines of the English poem (VIII.3147–72), the Latin poems and rubrics, and the French Traitié. The purpose of scribe 2’s changes was to remove lines with Venus’s praise of Chaucer (VIII.2941–70*), replacing them with lines that do not mention Chaucer. The purpose of scribe 3’s changes was to replace the reference to Richard II’s ‘commissioning’ of the book in the Prologue with a reference to ‘a bok for Engelondes sake’ and mention of Henry of Lancaster;