Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis

Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis Richard K. Emmerson Medieval Academy ofAmerica Th,so-called New Phdology hos given ,dded impetus to th, study of medieval literature within its manuscript context and has en­ couraged a genuine interdisciplinary examination of the dynamic ways in which the scribes, limners, and artists who produced manuscripts not only transmitted literary texts ro, but also reinterpreted and even re­ formed them for, later medieval readers. 1 Although many manuscripts ofvernacular literature were humble products, others visualized the text in brightly illuminated and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, whose fo­ lios are not only inscribed in inks of various colors highlighted with gold and elaborate colorful penwork, but also decorated with a hierarchy of paraphs, capitals, large initials, gilded frames, and floreated borders designed to aid and direct reading (see Fig. 1). If we are to understand the reception of a literary text in the later Middle Ages, then, we must not limit our investigations to textual matters alone. We must examine how the text was available to readers in particular manuscripts rather than how it is presented in a modern critical edition, and we must exam­ ine the miniatures that accompany the text in their manuscript context, not against the sanitized text of a critical edition. Although providing their own set of symbols that constitute a mod­ ern scholarly apparatus, critical editions usually elide the matrix ofsigns The research for this essay was supported by a Fellowship for College Teachers funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I wish also to express my gratitude for the hospitality of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, and my thanks to its director, Felicity Riddy. 1 See the essays in Speculum 65 (January 1990), particularly the introduction by Ste­ phen G. Nichols, "Philology in a Manuscript Culture," pp. 1-10. 143 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER that comprise a medieval manuscript, replacing the highly visual folio opening with what Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen have called the "blackening of the page," 2 a feature of the book that began in the later fifteenth century and is perhaps the strongest visual characteristic of the modern printed page. We must also set aside-at least at the beginning stages of analysis-the assumption that miniatures simply illustrated the literary text and recognize that they, like the other features of the decorated page, may serve more formal purposes intended to aid read­ ing.i One of the scholars who has done the most to redirect our attention to the manuscript context of medieval literature, Ralph Hanna, is surely right about "the power of the codex to generate meaning" and the im­ portance of considering "codicological aesthetics" in our own readings. Hanna notes that "medieval book-producers, in every case, had to devise a format in order to present a text, had to plan out a mise en page, an apparatus, a decorative system. These choices, again, provide particu­ larly provocative 'readings.' " 1 The value of studying the manuscript representation of a medieval literary text is exemplified by an analysis of the twenty illustrated manu­ scripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, which is primarily known to scholars in the two volumes of the Early English Text Society (EETS) edited by G. C. Macaulay at the turn of the twentieth century. 5 The edition has had a formative influence on critical understanding of Gow­ er's poem, particularly its use of Latin and the relationship between its 'Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen, "Incunable Description and Its Implications for the Analysis of Fifteenth-Century Reading Habits," inSandra L. Hindman, ed., Prjntjng the Wrhten Word: The Social Hist/ii)' ofBooks. Circa 1450-1520 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1991), p. 253. 'See my essay, "Text and Image in the Ellesmere Portraits of the Tale-Tellers," in MartinStevens and Daniel Woodward, eds., The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1995), pp. 143-70. It questions the common­ place approach to the famous portraits introducing the tales in the Ellesmere Chaucer, which critics often treat as realistic depictions of the pilgrims as described in the General Prologue...