SOURCE: Olsson, Kurt. “The Confessio and Compilation.” In John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis. pp. 1-15. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992.

In the following essay, Olsson interprets the Confessio Amantis as a compilation, in which Gower assembled materials from a wide variety of sources and organized them to create new or expanded meanings.

One of John Gower's undoubted claims to join the company of important late fourteenth-century English poets, including Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain-poet, lies in the vast knowledge he made available to his public. In three long, encyclopedic poems, he gathered and arranged material from a great number of ancient and medieval sources and, with a consistent stylistic grace, made that material accessible in his chosen language, whether it was French, as in the Mirour de l'Omme, Latin, as in the Vox Clamantis, or English, as in the Confessio Amantis...