SOURCE: Rytting, Jenny Rebecca. “In Search of the Perfect Spouse: John Gower's Confessio Amantis as a Marriage Manual.” Dalhousie Review 82, no. 1 (spring 2002): 113-26.

In the following essay, Rytting discusses Gower's depiction of marriage and its attendant virtues in the poetic tales of the Confessio Amantis.

John Gower's Confessio Amantis is many things—a social commentary, a poem of consolation, and a treatise on the seven deadly sins, to name a few.¹ It is also an exploration of love, in which Venus' priest Genius leads the woeful, rejected lover Amans through an exercise of confession and in so doing teaches him about love by means of a series of stories that demonstrate both its positive and its negative aspects. Paul Strohm, in fact, reminds us that the “reordering of the unruly passions of a representative lover” is Gower's literal topic in this work and warns against interpretations that downplay...