12 - Goods and the Good in the Confessio Amantis

Summary

While rich and poor characters and references to riches and poverty appear throughout Gower's Confessio Amantis, the number of stories that place some emphasis on poverty or the poor in the poem is arguably small. Only seven tales include poor characters or are in some sense about poverty. Characters defined by their riches figure more prominently in the poem and, not surprisingly, many of them can be found in Book V, the book devoted to the sin of Avarice, or the excessive desire to accumulate and hoard money and things. The Concordance to the Confessio shows that more than half the references to “tresor” are in Book V, while “moneie” and “monoie” are used only five times, and four out of these five are in Book V. Avarice, of course, as critics sometimes point out, is one of the critical sins in the Confessio Amantis. Not only does it occupy a central place in the poem as the subject of the fifth of eight books, but the book devoted to it is the longest in the whole work, longer by far than any other. The length of Book V and its central placement suggest that the poem is intensely interested in the relation between material things and the self (whether the self is rich or poor). In the following pages I will analyze this intense interest through the lens of “thing theory” and in line with recent critical work on the relation between subjects and objects in medieval literature.