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  TheVice of Acedia and the Gentil Occupacioun in Gower’s Confessio Amantis And it is a marvel he outdwells his hour, For lovers ever run before the clock. —Shakespeare’s Graziano Sloth in nobility, courtiers, schollers, or any men is the chiefest cause that brings them in contempt. —Thomas Nashe I Like all of the works studied so far, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis treats the subject of love.1 Unlike most of the others so far, however, the Confessio is not an art of love. It is a story collection framed by the confession of a frustrated lover. Far from an ars amatoria, in fact, the Confessio is a remedia amoris.2 By the end of the work, the narrator, Amans, whom we eventually discover to be an old man, learns to accept the limits of his age and is cured of his illness, the hopeless love of a young woman. The discourse of love as passion, then, plays a significant and continuous role in the Confessio. The Confessio’s frame narrative is built around a dialog between Amans and his confessor, Genius, a character from the Romance of the rose and the De planctu naturae.3 Through this confession, Amans is led to ana1 . This chapter is a substantially revised and enlarged version of my article “John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Ideology, and the ‘Labor’ of ‘Love’s Labor,’” Re-visioning Gower: New Essays, ed. R. F. Yeager (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 1998) 147–58. 2. “Remedia Amoris” is, in fact, the title of Theresa Tinkle’s chapter on the Confessio in Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). 3. For a summary of the scholarship on Genius, see Peter Nicholson, introduction, An Annotated Index to the Commentary on Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance  lyze the quality of his love and his behavior toward the young woman. The stories in the collection serve as exempla to illustrate various points Genius wishes to make about love. The structure of the collection is built around the tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins. In each of the books, the confessor analyzes one of the sins as it relates to love. While the sin of lust is excluded, the sin of acedia, or sloth, is not. Thus, in Book 4, Genius and Amans grapple with the question of what it means to be slothful in love, and whether Amans is guilty of this sin.4 If sloth is a sin, then purposeful activity, work, must be a virtue “in amoris causa” (in the condition of love). Hence, the discourse of love as labor overshadows the discourse of passion in Book 4. In a crucial passage, for example, Genius defines love as an occupation fit for all gentle hearts:  Acedia and the Gentil Occupacioun Texts and Studies, 1989) 11–13. On the conception of Genius and his relationship to reason and to Venus in the Confessio, see especially George Economou, “The Character of Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower,” Chaucer Review 4 (1970): 203–10. Economou argues that Gower modeled his character on the Genius in Alan of Lille’s De planctu rather than on the character in Jean de Meun’s Rose. For a summary of the scholarship on Amans, see Nicholson 15–17. 4. Several notable treatments of Book 4 of the Confessio serve as the background to this study. Russell Peck (Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978] 79–98) treats the discrepancy between the unproductive nature of Amans’s “labor” and his view that these are constructive activities. Peck sees Genius’s role as trying to teach Amans “the proper industry of the third estate” (93). Rozalyn Levin (“The Passive Poet: Amans as Narrator in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis,” Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association [DeKalb, Ill., 1986] 3.114–29) argues that Book 4 reveals Gower’s understanding of the courtly concept of “gentilesse.” Linda Marie Zaerr (“The Dynamics of Sloth: Fin amour and Divine Mercy in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis” [Diss. Univ. of Washington, 1987]) analyzes Gower’s adaptation in Book 4 of Christian teachings regarding acedia, particularly the relationship of the exempla and the frame narrative. She finds that the book reveals fatal inconsistencies and flaws in the concept of fin amors. R. F. Yeager (John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a...

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