Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the Confessio Amantis (review)

In this book, B. W. Lindeboom offers a thought-provoking assessment of the relationship between the two major English works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. The ambitious study brings the two poets together in a new way, offering more than a detailed explication of the loci classici of previous critical discussions of Gower/Chaucer literary exchange. While many readers have seen the discrete points of convergence between the writers' works as evidence of a poetic rivalry or even traces of a "quarrel" between friends, Lindeboom draws comparisons between the writers in order to give insight into Chaucer's ever-shifting compositional process. The argument in this book is two-fold: first, Chaucer radically altered his grand plan for The Canterbury Tales in the 1390s sometime after reading Gower's Confessio Amantis; second, Chaucer experimented with transforming the Tales along an expressly Gowerian model. In order to support this second claim, Lindeboom focuses on the significant structural similarities between the sermon-like performances of Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Pardoner.

Lindeboom's arguments hinge upon a particular reading of the 1390 redaction of Gower's Confessio; Gower's often-cited invocation of Chaucer and call for the poet to "make his testament of love" is typically "interpreted as an accolade" but it actually constitutes, in Lindeboom's assessment, "a less accommodating invitation to a literary contest" (p. 2). In the first chapter of the book, Linde-boom observes that Chaucer's original scheme of The Canterbury Tales (four tales per pilgrim) experienced a "radical switch from four to one" (p. 24), and he asserts that poet's "change of plan was motivated and given shape" by the Confessio, "a similarly linearly-constructed work" (p. 25). In the second chapter, Lindeboom suggests that Chaucer may have initially adapted The Legend of Good Women in response to Gower's "invitation to literary combat" (p. 53), and that "the original love vision in the Prologue [to the Legend] is . . . well-suited for a reaction to Gower's challenge" (p. 57). In a brief yet compelling third chapter, Lindeboom examines references to Chaucer's own Legend of Good Women within the Introduction to The Man of Law's Tale, "[finding] the Sergeant's portrait to be consonant with the notion that it [the presentation of the Man of Law] is likely parody of Gower himself" (p. 136).

In its final four chapters, the book shifts in its focus and structure, apparently reflecting the shifting gears in Chaucer's own compositional process. Here, Lindeboom analyzes the deep structural correspondences between the fictional performances of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. Devoting two chapters to each character, Lindeboom traces the organization and thematic complexity of their respective performances, demonstrating very convincingly that both characters deliver intricate literary sermons conversant with fourteenth-century preaching traditions. At the same time, the confessional and penitential contexts of these performances reveal how Chaucer himself drew heavily upon Gowerian models, especially the Confessio. This survey of structural correspondences and systematic identification of Gowerian echoes in these works is extremely thorough, and these four chapters amply demonstrate clear parallels between the Wife of Bath's and Pardoner's respective "sermons" (see pp. 331, 397, and 404). The enterprise yields intriguing results. The Wife of Bath, for example, is readily drawn into the orbit of Gower's Confessio. Not only is she the "female version of Amans, as a confessing and elderly (senex) lover . . . with a measure of Genius thrown in," but she "is easily," at the same time, "Chaucer's ironic rendition of Gower's Venus" (p. 154). Lindeboom wisely acknowledges that both the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner additionally draw upon non-Gowerian literary models such as St. Jerome's Epistola adversus Jovinianum and the Roman de la Rose (p. 159), and the nexus of structural parallels and verbal echoes presented in this book is remarkable.

As compelling as this book is, there...