John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the 'Confessio Amantis.'

The Confessio Amantis has never fit comfortably into the role of versified sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins to which received opinion, and one traditional line of criticism, have consigned it. If it is such, then Gower didn't manage it very well. The dialogue he created between Amans, "the lover," and his confessor Genius is full of awkwardnesses and inconsistencies that distract from, when they do not completely obscure, the coherency of the moral lessons. Genius himself is given an impossible task, serving both as priest of Venus and as Christian confessor. The many tales he tells are often morally inconclusive, or, like the long lectures with which they are interspersed, seem unconnected with the moral point at hand. And the entire English poem in which the dialogue is contained exists in an uncertain relationship with its Latin apparatus, including the witty and often double-edged epigrams that mark the divisions in the text and the long marginal prose commentary that tries gamely to define its moral bearings.

Only recently have the many puzzles of this poem become more the subject of scrutiny than of despair. Olsson's book is now the fullest and most comprehensive attempt to account for its diversity of structure, and offers the clearest proposal for a formal model for its interpretation.…