Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantisdetails the first years of the Confessio's material history and offers a major revision to a century's old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for "late stage" revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower's death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of theConfessio. It offers a reassessment of the political and literary relationships between versions dedicated to Richard II and Henry IV. It repositions Gower's laureate status in a London world of deluxe book production that created a canon of Ricardian poets linked to theirfifteenth-centuryinheritors. Finally, it identifies for the first time how late medieval authors designed their poetry as fictional artifacts that witness history from quasi-chronicles like Maidstone'sConcordiaorRichard the Redeless, quasi-petitions like the Lollard "Petition to the King and Parliament," quasi-epistles that begin so many texts, quasi-transcripts such as theRecord and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, and so on.