SOURCE: Runacres, Charles. “Art and Ethics in the ‘Exempla’ of ‘Confessio Amantis’.” In Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, edited by A. J. Minnis, pp. 106-34. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983.

In the following essay, Runacres investigates the “fruitful balance between pleasurable instruction and instructive pleasure” in the Confessio Amantis.

At the beginning of the ‘Prologus’ to Confessio Amantis, Gower announced that he was relinquishing the single-minded pursuit of ‘wisdom’ (‘Prologus’ 13) which had characterised his earlier poems. His new work would mingle delight with the profit, in such a way that the matter of the poem would be both instructive and pleasurable. The explicit ethical analyses and statements of the ‘Prologus,’ Book VII and the end of Book VIII, and the great structure of vices and virtues expounded by Genius, coexist with the delights of the amatory situation of Amans and those of the multitude of stories. Gower's first...