SOURCE: Olsson, Kurt. “Love, Intimacy, and Gower.” Chaucer Review 30, no. 1 (1995): 71-100.

In the following essay, Olsson explores the dynamics of power and love traced in the intimate personal relationships Gower treats in the Confessio Amantis and Mirour de l'Omme.

Recent discussions of intimacy and the “terrible desire for intimacy”¹ reflected in our culture often center on questions about sexuality, and that tendency should not surprise us. Throughout its history as an English word, “intimacy” has been used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and since Freud, we have become accustomed to looking for sexual undercurrents in other forms of interpersonal relationship, nowhere so commonly as in settings of intimacy. To be sure, the term may be understood differently and without such complication. Some observers have claimed, for example, that “between individuals, intimacy becomes the goal of the relationship, the joining of innermost feelings and qualities, an emotional closeness...