Close readings of Gower's poetry are not as common as broader or more thematic assessments, but such attention highlights the linguistic skill which makes Gower fit to stand with Chaucer among England's early makers of poetry. This essay will compare the two poets by exploring a particular formal aspect, namely rime riche, in which rhyme partners appear identical but diverge in meaning. Rich rhyme has received attention from scholars in diverse periods and provinces, most notably in Tony Hunt's recent book on Gautier de Coincy, Miraculous Rhymes. A medieval aesthetic that used such rhymes was once described almost apologetically by scholars, as though it were a phase of mannerism now outgrown, but medievalists today are not alone in appreciating rich rhyme, as Marjorie Perloff's recent discussion of W. B. Yeats attests. There is growing awareness of how rich rhymes, in medieval poetry as much as modern, can be not just ornamental to a poem's surface but at the heart of a poem, pointed and integral to its purpose.

Rime riche in medieval poetry is very frequent, featuring in 650 couplets of the French and English poetry of Gower alone. It reflects sophisticated literary culture, and Hunt has deepened our sense of the sententious, virtuoso and satirical nature of the device in the hands of a poet like Gautier, who positions many of his rich rhymes at the end of miracle tales as a moralizing coda. Rhyme reflects the poet's brilliant, authoritative voice. But what is the dramatic power of rime riche? What brilliance and authority are conferred upon a character who speaks with such rhymes, and on what level do fellow characters hear them? As in Gautier and Chaucer, the majority of rime riche couplets in Gower's Confessio Amantis are delivered by a narrator, Genius, yet Genius's sententious style is not meant for our ears alone. Amans reacts to Genius's rime riche couplets in a sophisticated ‘couplet war’, in which the frame narrative's fictional characters indeed hear rhyme.

When Gower made Genius a central figure in the Confessio Amantis he had already employed Venus's priest once before, in Vox Clamantis book IV, chapters 13–14. Chapters 13 and 14 seem to be a rather typical indictment of weak-willed femininity, as suggested by the heading of Chapter 13: ‘Hic loquitur vlterius de mulieribus, que in habitu moniali sub sacre religionis velo professionem suscipientes ordinis sui continenciam non obseruant’ (Here, he [Gower] speaks further concerning the women who, in the habits of nuns making profession of vows under the sacred veil of religion, do not observe due continence). However, Gower redirects and modifies this misogynist cliche through the inclusion of the male Genius, a sensual double for the supposedly intellectual masculine ecclesiastical institution, and the real target for his critique. Genius appears as a part of the ecclesiastical institution in both the Confessio Amantis and the Vox Clamantis, but while the ecclesiastical nature of his role in the Confessio is contestable, in the Vox he clearly functions as not only a confessor but also a bishop and scholar of theology. A close examination of his appearance in the Vox Clamantis shows how the sensual (feminine) pleasures of reading can subvert the supposedly prudential forms of masculine, institutional interpretation.

In the Confessio Amantis, and in its model, Jean de Meun's section of the Roman de la Rose, confession to Genius is a substitution, made visible by Genius's re-vestment by Venus. I wish to concentrate upon the institutional substitution that occurs, as the institutional forms that produce conscience and moral prudence (here, auricular confession) remain essentially the same, but their content is significantly altered. Gower, describing the failure of the institutional Church in Confessio Amantis book V, remarks upon the strange change of content: ‘The forme is kept, bot the matiere | Transformed is in other wise’ (Confessio, V, lines 1872–3). This sentence is not immediately logical: how can the form remain if the matter is transformed? Upon consulting the Middle English Dictionary, one finds that Gower is extremely inventive with the word ‘forme’, especially in uses concerning literary form and literary production.

Though John Gower's poetry is now rarely regarded as central to medieval studies, his work was popularly read and very well known in the early modern period. The figure of the poet Gower ‘that first garnisshed our Englysshe rude’ is mentioned five times in John Skelton's Garland of Laurel, and Gower is cited or appears subsequently as an emblem of a great poet in early modern works by Robert Greene, Ben Jonson and John Webster. The poet Gower further appears as the central player in William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in which he is given sustained dramatic life well beyond the limited mention Shakespeare makes directly to another medieval poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. Helen Cooper points out that ‘Shakespeare's return to Gower is a measure of the high value he was prepared to place on the native English traditions of poetry.’ This essay expands upon Cooper's assertion to explore the poet's early modern reputation as specifically seen in Shakespeare's representation of Gower, and then briefly examines aspects of Gower's resurrection in modern stage productions of Shakespeare's play.

As is well known, Pericles does not appear in the First Folio; its text was first published in the later Quarto of 1609. The play was entered on 20 May 1608 in the Stationers’ Register. It is often described as flawed and badly written; some scholars believe it was a memorial reconstruction by some of the actors similar to the ‘bad quarto’ of Hamlet. Others say Shakespeare picked up a dramatic project begun by George Wilkins, author of a related novel, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, published in 1608. Wilkins gave evidence along with Shakespeare in a lawsuit in 1613, and Katherine Duncan-Jones has proposed that Shakespeare may have dined in Wilkins's house (Wilkins was also a victualler) between 1604 and 1608. Earlier critics believed the play was a product of Shakespeare's youth, among them John Dryden, who wrote ‘Shakespeare's own muse her Pericles first bore’, while Edmund Malone, in his Shakespeare editions of the 1780s, asserted that ‘Pericles was the entire work of Shakespeare, and one of his earliest compositions.’ This idea was repeated by Henry Norman Hudson, who, in his 1901 introduction to the Aldus Shakespeare Pericles, described the play as ‘some exercise of the “prentice hand”’.

Confessio Amantis was, I believe, the first medieval poem to apply the priestly scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins systematically to the cause of love. Since that scheme of the Sins purported to cover the whole of human experience, one might suppose that Gower would have found a great deal to his purpose in treatments of love to be found in the clerical tradition, as if the job were already half done for him there. But this was evidently far from the case. The nearest way to see this is to read Gower's own earlier general treatment of the Sins in his Mirour de l’Omme. The exposition of them there is very long and elaborate, with each of the Seven Sins having five sub-species, or ‘daughters’ as they are called. Many of these daughters bear the same name as species of sin in the Confessio; yet a reader of the Mirour will find very little in it that anticipates the world of the English poem. There is nothing at all under four of the Sins (Anger, Sloth, Covetousness and Gluttony). Under Pride, a single stanza concerns the lover who boasts of a secret love (Mirour, lines 1909–20); and the section on Envy devotes a single stanza, again, to Malebouche, who makes young ladies blush by gossiping about their affairs (Mirour, lines 2701–12). Rather more substantially, the treatment of Foldelit, under Lechery, has 150 lines on the foolish pleasures of young women in love with love and on the young men who languish for them without food or sleep (Mirour, lines 9277–432). But these few passages amount to very little out of a total of 9000 lines. On this evidence – and, I think, on any evidence – Gower had to do most of the work himself when he came in the Confessio to map the scheme of the Seven Sins onto the life of Amans.

Gower's latest project, then, was a challenging one; and I want to touch here on some of the difficulties as well as the opportunities that it presented, sketching out what might be called a cost/benefit analysis.

In I Henry IV Shakespeare found the perfect metaphor to stage the political tumult of Gower's England. Facing off against his erstwhile supporters in the climactic battle of Shrewsbury, Henry, the traitor turned king, spreads confusion by disguising several lieutenants in his own coat of arms, so that the rebels cannot recognize the true king. The Earl of Douglas's military frustration adumbrates Henry IV's political problem as well:

To Henry's reply, ‘I will assay thee’, Douglas responds, ‘I fear thou art another counterfeit, | And yet in faith thou bearest thee like a king’ (I Henry IV, V. 4. 35, 36–7). The interchange offers counterfeiting – the illicitly multiplied image of the king's face struck in metal – as a metaphor for the crisis of legitimacy after Henry's deposition of Richard has allowed many claimants to spring up in place of one.

Under the metaphor lies the language of alchemy: Douglas expects ‘colors’ to reveal the true king, while Henry ‘assays’ Douglas's true mettle/metal. Since alchemical colours are unreliable signs of identity, Douglas resolves to kill all who bear the king's coat of arms. Shakespeare's alchemical metaphor recasts the political problem as epistemological: not just a matter of illicit multiplication, more fundamentally it suggests the loss of a whole world of sacramental continuity in which the face of things had made visible their invisible inward identities.

In linking alchemical language to the tumultuous changes of the late fourteenth century, Shakespeare was anticipated by Gower. Gower's commitment in the Confessio Amantis to the reformation of individual and public governance, and to a poetic language that refers plainly and truly, will not surprise readers of this volume. What is surprising, however, is that his model for plain, truthful transformation is alchemy. Gower's endorsement of alchemy in Confessio book IV is at odds not only with the usual exposes of transmutation, but also with his own intolerance of fraud in language and deed.

Given the scope of Gower's Confessio Amantis, sometimes the most surprising choices are the omissions, the stories Gower chooses not to tell. In book IV's discussion of Sloth and the various sins of idleness in love, Genius turns to the need for young men to remain active lest they lose the love of their ladies. It is, on the face of things, an ideal subject for romance, as Genius recognizes:

This is, I think, an interesting move for Genius – and by extension Gower – to make. Genius acknowledges that a fourteenth-century English audience looking for feats of chivalry in the service of love would most naturally read ‘books of Lancelot’ or other romances. More specifically, the Vulgate Lancelot offers plenty of examples of Lancelot momentarily falling into knightly ‘sloth’ before once again serving his lady heroically – the Chevalier de la Charrette episode would seem particularly apt for the point Genius is making here, and he seems to acknowledge as much in these lines. Yet without quite saying that he won't tell such stories, Genius turns away from such romances towards his preferred sources in ‘old cronique’.

This substitution of ‘old cronique’ for books of Lancelot becomes a little stranger when Genius begins his next tale immediately after these lines. It is an Ovidian story, the tale of the battle between Hercules and Achelous (or Achelons, for Gower) for the hand of Deianira. But the tale has been considerably altered from its source in the Metamorphoses, and has come to look much more like a short romance. In Ovid, the tale is told by Achelous and from his perspective, and it presents Hercules as a thuggish brute, ‘accensae non fortiter imperat irae’ (‘unable to master his burning anger any longer’), who nonetheless prevails.

The prologue to the first recension of the Confessio Amantis describes the now-famous patronage scene, wherein King Richard commands that the narrator ‘som newe thing I sholde boke’ (Confessio, Prol., line 51). This scene takes place upon the Thames, ‘under the toun of newe Troye’, after the narrator has left his own boat and come aboard the royal barge at the king's request. It is one of the few literal manifestations of London we have in Gower's poetry and remarkable also in its representation of literary patronage. As Robert Epstein states, ‘It becomes difficult to find in Gower's writing any association with the City of London or its suburbs.’ Rather, Epstein continues, comparing Gower's separation from London with the famous portrait of Gower removed from the globe, Gower ‘is of the world but not in it’. So too is the Thames passage a representation of this, since the narrator is looking upon London, but is separate and apart from it in the river. I am not so much interested here in the historical veracity of this event, something which has been much debated in the past, and which will probably never be verified. Instead, I am interested in addressing why Gower chose to narrate this section of the poem in the way that he did, both in the body of the poem and in the attendant marginal notations. Gower, on the barge, traverses a river that, like contemporary cartographic representations of the globe, splits his world in three: suburban Southwark and its melange of professions, the courts of Westminster, and the economic, artistic and political hub of the city of London itself. In this opening scene Gower, rather than inhabiting the margins, becomes the poetic centre for this urban environment, and that centre (the Thames) is unabashedly commercial.

Whether or not the meeting ever happened, or actually happened in the way narrated, in this opening scene Gower capitalizes upon the cultural and economic role of the Thames to position himself, as poet, apart from the confines of London and yet able to comment upon the various political and social machinations of his mercantile urban environment.

Even by his apologists Gower is not considered a master of the dream-vision, though he has gained a minor – I think too minor – reputation as one of its demolishers. Most surveys of medieval dream-vision poetry fail to include his uses of dream-visions at all. A. C. Spearing's foundational discussion Medieval Dream-Poetry omits Gower, no doubt because the Confessio Amantis has as a whole only a questionable claim to being in the dream-vision tradition. Kathryn Lynch's High Medieval Dream-Vision includes the Confessio but, in some ways more strangely, does not focus mainly on Gower's explicit dream-visions, in that poem or others. Instead, Lynch treats the Confessio as a whole as an example of how features of the genre have survived outside their original habitat: features such as the figure of Genius and a philosophy of ‘the way that the world is organized to reflect God's plan’, for which she has in mind precedents like Alan of Lille and the Roman de la Rose.

These evasions are kinder than some of the direct attention. To consider Gower's explicit handling of the genre most commentators turn to the Vox Clamantis book I, with its depiction of the ‘Peasants’ Rebellion’ of 1381 in which domesticated or other normally placid animals are monstrously transformed. But this work is often treated as an embarrassing sport in the dream-vision genre. Maria Wickert, still the work's most attentive commentator, notes its structural awkwardness in which, for instance, the author ‘obviously had difficulty padding out’ the description of an entire spring day before falling asleep, because, she ingeniously suggests, ‘Gower did not wish to give up the traditional spring morning scheme [of courtly love allegories], but … was obliged to place the dream at night’ to fit the tradition of exegetical dream-visions. She adds that Gower ‘manipulates historical account and allegorical interpretation in such a way that they never fully coincide … The author leaps continuously from one manner of presentation to another.’

The collected works of the English poet John Gower, who died in 1408, run to about 30,000 lines divided into Latin, Middle English and some form of French, at roughly a third each. Linguistically speaking he deserves to be called, as he often is, a bit of a fence-sitter, or a bet-hedger, but there is of course another way to look at Gower's three languages. Indeed, he suggests it himself (for I am quite convinced that the words are his own) in a Latin poem supposedly penned by ‘a certain philosopher’ and known, from its first two words, as ‘Eneidos, Bucolis’. In it, Gower is found superior to Virgil, whose ‘justly famous’ three works the Aeneid, the Bucolics and the Georgics are all nonetheless only in Latin, while Gower ‘wrote […] three poems in three languages, | So that broader schooling might be given to men’ (‘Te tua set trinis tria scribere carmina linguis | Constat, ut inde viris sit scola lata magis’). Now, if indeed Gower, ‘fingens se auctor esse Philosophorem’, wrote that about himself, we have reason to take a somewhat greater account than we have yet of differences in the kinds of work he produced in each of his three languages.

Clearly, Gower the writer of French who ought to stand outlined visibly before us had different ambitions for each of the poems he wrote. Because of his evident trilingual fluency, he could make choices – and must have – about the use to which he put each language. Although he never says specifically, in a theoretical way, what he is up to, Gower does come pretty close in the Prologue of the Confessio Amantis when he states that:

– or ‘king Richardes sake’, depending on the version. And Gower is, I think, making a similar statement, albeit not in so many words, when at the end of his life he seems greatly to prefer writing in Latin.

In John Gower's Anglo-French lyric cycle, the Cinkante Balades, the fivepoem woman's series marks a critical moment. Gower positions the woman's response within the last fifth of the cycle, grouping her apparently contradictory poems together as a self-contained series, Balades 41–44 and 46. Mathematically one-tenth of the whole, the woman's response to the male speaker nevertheless occupies much emotional space in the cycle. Gower's male speaker begs for, describes and reacts to the woman's poems repeatedly in his own Balades. Comparing her and her replies to diamond, marble, rock and crystal, the male speaker learns to praise his beloved's stony resistance. He tries to use his poems to wear her down, but, ultimately, her Balades polish and refine his: in fact, the woman's response reflects and corrects his poetic vocabulary. Only in the wake of the woman's series can the male speaker find poetic honour and comment on love's virtue. Thus Gower suggests that the woman and her reply illuminate and clarify whole text.

Yet, while the woman's response has attracted some critical attention, it has not received a thorough treatment. Lynn Wells Hagman claims that the woman's poems ‘tell a little story of her own’, but she concludes that the ‘mistress’ section does not end on a particularly strong note’. Instead she argues that, as the male speaker has ‘progressively less and less to do with the actual love situations’ involving the woman, ‘Gower himself’ emerges and leads the cycle to ‘progress in moral tone toward the climax’ in the unnumbered Marian coda Balade following the numbered cycle in the manuscript. In Hagman's reading the Virgin replaces the earthly woman of the male speaker's poems as the object of Gower's own desire. Likewise, Russell Ralph Cressman argues that the male speaker's initial fascination with the woman and ‘fin amour’ gives way to Gower's increasing emphasis on ‘vrai amour’, what he calls ‘brotherly love’.

In the Prologue to Confessio Amantis, apocalyptic is the vehicle for a farreaching statement about the shape of history and about good political order. This is political theology of a different order from the noon-day demon and animal Armageddon fireworks of Vox Clamantis. The thoroughness of the poem's apocalyptic indicates how full and theorized is the Confessio's idea of earthly politics. The Prologue's apocalyptic history is mirrored in the lover's personal, penitential apocalypse at the end of the poem. This implies a fulcrum between the political and the personal, and this fulcrum bears a special, politically positive load in Gower's idiosyncratic inflection of apocalyptic with a wished-for new Arion.

Apocalyptic and apocalypse are overlapping but not coterminous categories. Bernard McGinn sets out the distinctions: ‘The word apocalypse means “revelation”, the unveiling of a divine secret.’ Apocalypse in this sense might not be apocalyptic in the sense of ‘linking the succession of time and its end’. Apocalyptic or apocalypticism is ‘a species of the genus eschatology’distinguished by the urgency of its concern for ‘the structure and End of history’. It might not be presented in the form of an apocalypse.

The apocalyptic in the Confessio is more coherent than that of the Vox, but, focusing on the figure of a new Arion, it also introduces a level of contingency untypical of apocalyptic writing in general. Helen Cooper has observed that apocalyptic writing ‘in the Middle Ages, and later’, uses ‘the idea of the nonnegotiable judgments of God to take political and moral discourse out of the realm of debate and replace it with a religious absolute’. God's sense of right and wrong functions in such a way in the Confessio, but the new Arion passage posits that the timing of Judgment is contingent, and depends on human disunity or social reform. This gives the poem's apocalyptic theory a very significant pro-history twist, imagining for lay poetry and politics independent (if divinely monitored) power on the threshold of the religious absolute.

When one speaks of models of virtuous, productive labour in the medieval period, the alchemist is not a figure that springs immediately to mind. In the sixteenth century Reginald Scot lambastes those who made use of alchemical language and practices as ‘ranke couseners, and consuming cankers to the common wealth, and therefore to be rejected and excommunicated from the fellowship of all honest men’, a forceful opinion which is far from unfamiliar in earlier centuries. In fact, outside of those who claim to practise alchemy and produce texts of their own, it seems that little good can be said about it. Alchemy is satirized, condemned and generally mistrusted. It is probably heretical. Its literature fails to describe it clearly because the practice is a shadowy, immoral sham. False coining, charlatanry and out and out theft – all were dangers when entering into an alchemist's laboratory, to say nothing of violent explosions and other experimental disasters. In short, there is a reason that Dante condemns alchemists to one of the lowest circles of Hell.

Yet it is in this very environment of mistrust and suspicion that Gower writes book IV of the Confessio Amantis, with its surprising validation of alchemy as the highest possible form of human labour. The ‘problem’ with Gower's treatment of alchemy, I will argue, has less to do with its presence in the poem and more to do with the plainness of its presentation. After all, there are many things that Gower might well find attractive about the practice of alchemy – its focus on unification and purity, its demands for studious discipline, the faith it puts in divine intervention – but all of these qualities are dwarfed by the science's insistence on transformational labour and the virtue of its adepts. This last element, that of labour (both textual and material) is critical to Gower's characterization of alchemy as a remedy for the sin of Sloth but also to the larger confessional framework of the poem. Through alchemy Gower shows his audience how to become virtuous readers who are able to materially change themselves through the abstract and immaterial world of the text.

When we think about the inheritance of a classical past, we tend to think towards Greece and towards Rome. Of course, as medievalists, there are very many good reasons to do so. The dominance of ecclesiastical Latinity, its works disseminated through the network of the Roman church, tied the most significant intellectual trends of the era to a culture that was palpably rooted in the shared inheritance of this Greco-Roman past. And in the world of vernacular literature the varied romance traditions laboured mightily to tell the story of the descent of contemporary aristocratic cultures from their progenitors in Rome, in Thebes and in Troy. The twin pillars of ‘translatio studii’ and ‘translatio imperii’ frame the ‘longue durée’ that organizes much of our work, helping us feel history as, say, a Chaucer or Gower certainly would have done.

In more recent years there has been a great deal of re-examination of these narratives, often under the rubric of locally adapted post-colonial studies. Work by scholars such as Christine Chism, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng and David Wallace has called into question the westward drift of medieval culture, asking many vital questions about the impact of non-European cultures on writers whom we had often read within a relatively hermetic European tradition. Inspired in part by Edward Said's brilliant work on the formation of Orientalism, such scholars, and many others, have drawn our gaze Eastward, asking us to re-examine the medieval thirst for marvels of the East and the impact of both mercantile networks and Crusading campaigns on the literature produced on the fourteenth-century home front. But in the present essay I want to look neither West nor East, but South, and ask about the place of Egypt in the medieval imagination, specifically the place of Egypt in Gower's work. And even to call it South is something of a misdirection here, as I will want to argue that, even more than the mutually fashioning dialectic of East and West, Egypt appeared to Gower as a historical problem in that it was both utterly alien and yet utterly intrinsic to the crucial theological and political inheritances of the classical Mediterranean world.

The Man of Law's Tale was based on the account of Constance's travels written first by John Gower, and The Wife of Bath's Tale derives from the Tale of Florent in Confessio Amantis. The fact that both of Chaucer's source-texts occur early in Gower's collection even suggests some preliminary access to the Confessio as a work-in-progress in the late 1380s. In addition to sharing manuscripts back and forth, literary rivalry can be detected in Chaucer's attempts at re-writing these tales, some playful competition rather than the quarrel speculated by Thomas Tyrwhitt in the 1770s. In The Man of Law's Prologue, Chaucer encrypts a sly portrait of Gower as the legal professional, who held power of attorney while Chaucer travelled to Italy in 1378, but also a severe critic of his poetry; in The Man of Law's Tale, Gower's alter ego narrates a new and improved version of his own tale of Constance.

This paper explores further the collegial exchanges between the two poets in terms of the Confessio and the Legend of Good Women by proposing that influence, as such, continued to flow in the direction proposed by John Leland around 1540 – ‘de Govero plura in Chaucero dicemus’ – from Gower to Chaucer. My argument requires two radical claims. First, the received chronology of Chaucer's canon needs adjusting in order to position the Legend in the F Prologue as well as the G version later than Gower's collection datable to the early 1390s. And second, Gower (b. 1330?) assumes the position of an older brother asserting influence and generating anxiety for his slightly younger contemporary Chaucer (b. 1340?), something like the competitive relationship better documented between Petrarch and Boccaccio. No weakling in this challenge for making literary history, Chaucer qualifies as one of Harold Bloom's ‘strong poets’ who ‘make that history by misreading one another so as to clear imaginative space for themselves’. Chaucer plays with his adaptations of tragic love-stories in the Legend, while both Legend Prologues take Gower's lucky encounter with Richard II on the royal barge and recast the scene as Chaucer's nightmarish interrogation before the tyrannical God of Love.

As M. A. Manzalaoui has noted, to choose book VII of John Gower's Confessio Amantis as a topic is to load oneself with the handicap of a subject most critics have found particularly dull. Furthermore, the passage from book VII describing the fifteen stars, stones and herbs is a subject most critics have entirely dismissed. With the exception of Patricia Eberle, those few scholars who have deigned to comment on the passage find it to be simply pedantic. While each of the previous six books of the Confessio focuses on one of the deadly sins, book VII is immediately a significant digression, for it does not discuss lechery, as expected, but describes ‘al that to a king belongeth’ (Confessio, VI, line 2413). The book is, in fact, a ‘mirror for princes’, a handbook of instruction for a young king; thus it elaborates the theme of kingship set out initially in the Prologue. Why, then, does Gower include a seemingly obscure and uninspiring passage on the fifteen stars, fifteen stones and fifteen herbs? How does such a passage fit into the poem's primary theme of kingship and secondary theme of love? By exploring the passage in light of the scientific treatises of the period, examining other references to stars, stones and herbs as they are found throughout the poem and determining the reception of the passage in the centuries immediately following Gower's death we begin to understand the importance such a presentation held for its author and his audience.

The theme of kingship and good governance is established in the Prologue and pervades the entire work. Book VII provides the greatest elaboration on this theme, resulting in the seeming divergence from the poem's principal narrative. It is presented as Aristotle's teaching to Alexander the Great and focuses on the two types of knowledge needed to be an effective ruler: theoretical knowledge, including theology, physics and mathematics, with a brief digression on the four elements, humours and parts of the world; and practical knowledge, including the five moral principles or points of policy – truth, liberality, justice, pity and charity.