Borges and Nobel Prize-winner J Coetzee coincide on many points. Both have written literary criticism consistently throughout their careers, and there are similarities in their views on specific writers (e.g. Kafka), philosophers, and works. The two resemble each other in their use of language, their education, family background, and post-colonial agendas. Borges is present at numerous levels in Coetzee’s novels, for example in ’Foe’ (Borges had himself written on ’Robinson Crusoe’), and Borgesian self-masking of the author pervades novels from ’Elizabeth Costello’ (2003) on.

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.

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.

The history of any book's ownership, its passage from person to person, from place to place, is largely one that has to be reconstructed, not from the evidence contained within the material form of the work itself, but chiefly by reference to external documents. There may, of course, be signs of ownership within the book, annotations, coats of arms, signatures or shelf marks, but these do not invariably appear and often do not occur at all; where they do exist they are not always identifiable and are hence of limited evidential value. Insofar as any book may have a developed provenance record that can be securely traced it is likely to be a record of the details of its commercial history, a record of who paid what for it where, when, and to whom; such a record must be largely retrieved from details in inventories, sales catalogues, and dealers' files.

Recovering such details is fraught with difficulties. It requires considerable skill and a fair bit of luck to establish what a book actually sold for at any point in its history. A published price at auction (the most common means of establishing value) is now likely to be based not just on the actual “hammer price,” that price at which it was actually sold at the conclusion of bidding, but on this figure together with the various buyers' and vendors' premiums that are also charged.