SOURCE: Echard, Siân. “Pre-Texts: Tables of Contents and the Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis.” Medium Aevum 66, no. 2 (1997): 270-87.

In the following essay, Echard examines the early practice of compiling tables of contents and glosses for the numerous manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis as establishing frames for reading and understanding the poem.

The forty-nine surviving English manuscripts¹ of John Gower's Confessio Amantis are noteworthy for their remarkably high quality and consistency, features which have shaped much of the investigation of the manuscripts since. In his 1900 edition, G. C. Macaulay detected in the early history of the text ‘a steady tendency to rid itself of error’, and added that ‘the process of corruption in the ordinary sense [could] hardly be said to have set in until after the death of the author’.² The suggestion of authorial control which underlies these remarks was amplified by John Fisher into the...