SOURCE: Robins, William. “Romance, Exemplum, and the Subject of the Confessio Amantis.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997): 157-81.

In the following essay, Robins analyzes the intersection of narrative romance and moral exempla in the Confessio Amantis, studying this juxtaposition within the critical contexts of reader subjectivity.

The version of the story of “Apollonius of Tyre” that John Gower presents in book 8 of the Confessio Amantis is an ancient romance construed according to the expectations for an exemplum.¹ Many of the other medieval adaptations of this ancient romance may have been “exemplary” in a wide sense of that term, referring in a loose fashion to any stories that were presented so as to engage the reader morally. Gower's version, however, is the first to be couched in the more precisely defined structure of an exemplum, such as was developed in late thirteenth-century sermons and thence introduced into fourteenth-century...