Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction A Light Thrown upon Darkness: Writing about Medieval British Sexuality
- 1 ‘Open manslaughter and bold bawdry’: Male Sexuality as a Cause of Disruption in Malory's Morte Darthur
- 2 Erotic (Subject) Positions in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale
- 3 Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance
- 4 ‘Naked as a nedyll’: The Eroticism of Malory's Elaine
- 5 ‘How love and I togedre met’: Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the Confessio Amantis
- 6 ‘Bogeysliche as a boye’: Performing Sexuality in William of Palerne
- 7 Fairy Lovers: Sexuality, Order and Narrative in Medieval Romance
- 8 Text as Stone: Desire, Sex, and the Figurative Hermaphrodite in the Ordinal and Compound of Alchemy
- 9 Animality, Sexuality and the Abject in Three of Dunbar's Satirical Poems
- 10 The Awful Passion of Pandarus
- 11 Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
5 - ‘How love and I togedre met’: Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the Confessio Amantis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction A Light Thrown upon Darkness: Writing about Medieval British Sexuality
- 1 ‘Open manslaughter and bold bawdry’: Male Sexuality as a Cause of Disruption in Malory's Morte Darthur
- 2 Erotic (Subject) Positions in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale
- 3 Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance
- 4 ‘Naked as a nedyll’: The Eroticism of Malory's Elaine
- 5 ‘How love and I togedre met’: Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the Confessio Amantis
- 6 ‘Bogeysliche as a boye’: Performing Sexuality in William of Palerne
- 7 Fairy Lovers: Sexuality, Order and Narrative in Medieval Romance
- 8 Text as Stone: Desire, Sex, and the Figurative Hermaphrodite in the Ordinal and Compound of Alchemy
- 9 Animality, Sexuality and the Abject in Three of Dunbar's Satirical Poems
- 10 The Awful Passion of Pandarus
- 11 Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Gower's poetry has more often been associated with the moral than the erotic, courtesy of Chaucer's provocative description in Troilus and Criseyde. Studies such as Diane Watt's Amoral Gower have gone some way to counteract this, and open up the range of Gower's discourses on the political, ethical and erotic issues of his time. The Confessio Amantis connects directly and frankly through the persona of Amans with the tensions age brings to lust and love. Venus may tell Amans that ‘Loves lust and lockes hore / In chamber acorden neveremore’, but the Confessio shows us Gower understood the complexities of impulse and behaviour that age and love created. In this essay I shall concentrate on how these complexities are brought out through the exchanges between Amans and Genius, as well as Amans and Venus, showing how the Confessio exploits conventions of courtly and classical literature to examine an essentially human experience with humour, wit and perspicacity.
All of Gower's three largest works look at sexual behaviours, but the Mirour de l'Omme (1376–79) and the Vox Clamantis (begun in 1377) focus on the sinful nature of lechery, rather than looking at love and the more erotic complications that this can bring. The Confessio, written around 1390, chooses to explore this more elusively challenging context, and to do so in English, through the diegetic alter ego of Amans.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain , pp. 69 - 84Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014