In the 1760s, an English recusant who ended his days in Spain put together a series of biographies of Old and Middle English writers. One of the authors portrayed is John Gower, who is presented as:

This unpublished manuscript is the earliest known reference to John Gower to be found in Spain throughout the early modern period, despite the fact that two of the most important libraries in the country have copies of the medieval Portuguese and Castilian translations of the Confessio Amantis. Actually, it is with a certain perplexity that we discover the first published notice of any of these translations in Spain only at the end of that same century, in an appendix to a bibliographical compilation.

The location of the two Iberian Confessios among the holdings of, on the one hand, the Royal Library in Madrid (the Portuguese manuscript) and, on the other, the Royal Library of El Escorial (the Castilian manuscript) has tended to be unquestionably associated with what is common assent among scholars: the Lancastrian affiliation of both translations through John of Gaunt's daughters, Philippa and Catherine, who were married, respectively, to the kings of Portugal and Castile. Thus, the Iberian reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis within the context of the monarchy has been taken for granted, even for the two extant manuscripts. However, some recent codicological studies are offering new views on the scribal contexts of these manuscripts as well as on the history of their early ownership. The purpose of my essay is to examine these findings from a heretofore unexplored perspective: the early modern reception of the Iberian copies of the Confessio. The fact that these royal libraries were only founded in the early modern period makes us wonder about the fortune of the two manuscripts between the fifteenth century—when they were copied—and the time when they were acquired for those collections.

The foundation of the first English Catholic seminary in Spain after the Armada defeat could be seen as a retreat from the ‘frontline’ that the colleges in Flanders and France offered, but for its founder, Robert Persons, it was a strategic step to consolidate the strength of the mission to re-convert England. Spain, the European bastion of Catholic faith, was the obvious choice to establish a solid base of operations, considering that Philip II, who was providing important economic support for the mission, would have the opportunity to supervise how his money was being used and what sort of education the students were receiving. Following the foundation of St Alban's College in Valladolid in 1589, its immediate success led to new seminaries in Seville (1592), Madrid (1610) and Lisbon (1622). These institutions have received comparatively little attention from scholars of early modern English Catholicism, who have mainly focused on the English colleges of Douai and Rome. This scholarly neglect is due to a variety of reasons, among them the fact that Douai and Rome were constituted earlier and their sources are more easily accessible; but the project of a future Catholic England was also embraced by the exiles who came to Spain to train as missionary priests and return to their homeland as ‘soldiers of the faith’.

Scholarship in Anglo-Iberian relations developed during the second half of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first century to such an extent that few readers would subscribe today to the often quoted statement made in 1906 by the eminent hispanophile James Fitzmaurice-Kelly about the “almost complete insulation of each country with regard to one another” in the Middle Ages, or his other affirmation that “the first step to sustained intellectual commerce” started at the end of the fifteenth century, in allusion to the thirteen Fables of Alfonce (by the Aragonese Jewish convert, Pedro Alfonso, or Petrus Alphonsus) which were included in the 1483 edition of Caxton's Aesop. María Bullón-Fernández, among others, has also drawn our attention to this fact. Two historians in the 1950s had indeed opened the ground for new views in relation to the fourteenth century: the Spanish medievalist Luis Suárez Fernández and the Oxford scholar Peter E. Russell, although in more recent years the current interest in Al-Andalus as a decisive factor in the conformation of Europe and European culture has yielded books such as those by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman, Sharon Kinoshita, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, or, some decades earlier, one by Alice E. Lasater.

My purpose in this chapter is not to focus on this latter sort of exploration, but rather to look back again on the particular historical, political, and dynastic conditions that linked England to Iberia during the fourteenth century, a period when writers such as John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Canciller Pero López de Ayala lived and composed their best known works.

“Este lyvro, per graça do muym alto senhor deus, screveo, per mandado de dom Fernando de Castro o Moço, na çidade de Çepta, em xxxxta dias no ano de 1430, Joham Barroso” [this book, by grace of the highest lord God, I have copied, at the command of Dom Fernando de Castro o Moço, in the city of Ceuta, in forty days in the year 1430. João Barroso]. This inscription in Portuguese appears on the final leaf of Madrid, Real Biblioteca MS II-3088, a fifteenth-century manuscript bound and cataloged among books in the Royal Private Library under the title Livro do Amante. Together with Madrid, El Escorial Library MS g-II-19, also copied in the fifteenth century but rather in Castilian Spanish and titled Confysion del Amante, these two manuscripts present a tantalizing glimpse of the how disparate was the readership of John Gower's major Middle English poem, the Confessio Amantis, mere decades after the poet's death in 1408. Likely transported among the effects of Philippa and Catherine of Lancaster, daughters of John of Gaunt and future queens, respectively, of Portugal and Castile, when they accompanied their father's invasion of Iberia in 1386, Gower's Confessio thus stands as the first poem translated out of English into any Continental language – initially into Portuguese, and thence into Castilian. Not until the early seventeenth century did the Confessio have a competitor.

Venus's dismissal of John Gower at the end of the Confessio Amantis ostensibly represents the end of his dual career as a lover and an author. Freed from his “trance” (CA VIII.2813) and shocked into recognition by the mirror rendering an accurate “liknesse of miselve” (CA VIII.2437), the poet receives a rosary of black beads with the gold inscription “Por reposer” (CA VIII.2907) and a new commission, to seek and pray for peace. This scene is echoed in the Confessio's explicit, literally the final words, in which the poet's book is sent to find lasting repose under the earl of Derby: sub eo requiesce futurus. Other elements of the poem, however, belie this sense of closure. Venus directs Gower not just to erotic and poetic retirement but to his own works: “But go ther vertu moral duelleth, | where ben thi bokes, as men telleth, | Which of long time thou has write” (CA VIII.2925–27). His literary destination is the Mirour de l'Omme and the Vox Clamantis, works that treat ethics, have found an audience influential enough to be proverbial (“as men telleth”), and were written “of long time” – both in the authoritative past and through a long process of composition and conceptual development.

“This is the first instalment of one of those monuments of tedious and unremunerative toil which, even in these days of commercialised literature, there are still scholars to put together, and which the Clarendon Press, to its honour, is always ready to publish.” So opens the March 1900 review in the Academy of the first volume of G. C. Macaulay's edition of John Gower's works. Volumes two and three were praised in the same periodical in 1901 as “a monument of remorseless and well-informed industry,” and the 1903 review of the Latin volume once again singles out Macaulay's “industry” and the press's “munificence,” all in service of a writer who is “tedious enough from the literary point of view, but remarkably characteristic, both in his defects and in his achievements, of the dying middle ages.” The Academy is not alone in its view: the Saturday Review closed its assessment of the Latin volume by noting that “Mr Macaulay has discharged his duty as an editor as efficiently and conscientiously as he has done in the case of the French and English poems. We heartily congratulate him on the successful completion of a work which must have involved much arduous and dreary labour.”

All these reviews set up the same dynamic. On the one hand there is Gower, writing endlessly, in three languages and, rather mysteriously it seems, enjoying such contemporary popularity that these long works normally survive in many manuscripts. On the other, there is the heroic Macaulay, weighed down by this tedious freight but doing yeoman’s service to make Gower’s works available, even though no one is likely to want to read them.