Chapter 3 - Topical and Tropological Gower: Invoking Armenia in the Confessio Amantis

Summary

Gower's Confessio Amantis is famous for its semiotic and narrative complexity: it is a text that deploys familiar exemplary narratives redirected to unexpected or puzzling moral lessons. The question of ‘how the poem means’ has posed a continual challenge to modern scholars, many of whom have explicated the text within the broad paradigm of reader-response criticism, identifying the reader's mind as the site where meaning is created in response to the various elements of the text. In its mixture of didacticism and indeterminacy, in its implicit focus on how meaning can be implied and inferred, the text reflects aspects of late medieval literary practice described by Virginie Minet-Mahy in Esthétique et pouvoir de l’oeuvre allegorique a l’époque de Charles VI where she argues that the late medieval didactic text is a site of semiotic play, in which ‘la seule citation du nom suffit souvent a faire emerger a la conscience du lecteur un univers de representation’. Exemplary narratives and allegories are designed more to raise questions than to provide answers; in doing so, they offer a web of potential meaning and possible interpretation to which various readers respond in various ways, but whose general tropological purpose is ethical, to awaken self-knowledge that leads to self-control and ultimately to the harmonious creation of common profit, ‘le bien publique’. At the same time, a text that sustains semiotic play is itself already a reading.

Authors drawing on sources and shared culture interpret their reading by the way they create their texts. Distilling the result of their own reading, they produce open texts that provide sites of semiotic play for others and latent guides to interpretation at the same time.