Originally, I read this text in error. I had requested Nicholson's monograph for my Gower term paper last semester, and as the book came late I picked it up with a stack of exam reading texts. Assuming it was on my list, I sat down Saturday morning and spent three hours or so pouring over it, went to write my blog post, and realized it wasn't on my list. While I was frustrated at the time, I am glad I did so now as the opposite happened yesterday. I sat down to read Justin Steinberg's Accounting for Dante. While the book itself is a rather interesting consideration of Dante's readership, I quickly discovered that it basically had nothing to do with my exam topics or interests. My intention with choosing Accounting for Dante was that I was convinced, for some reason, it looked at mercantile culture through Dante's texts, which I would have used more for its methodology than anything else. Unfortunately this was not the case, but Nicholson's text is actually more related to my topic, as it at least covers a major text on my list, so I'm switching them out.
In his Preface, Nicholson self consciously states that it is not usually a compliment to say that a new book could have been written forty years ago, but defends his approach to an extended reading of the Confessio Amantis as filling the critical gap as no one produced such a reading in the past hundred years of scholarship. As such, Nicholson's text attempts to make an overarching reading of the massive text that comprises Gower's Confessio Amantis. Critical attention of Gower's work has picked up in the past decade or so, as scholars have begun to push back on the "Moral Gower" designation. Interestingly, prejudice against Gower is still prevalent as one book review of Nicholson's book finds it novel that the author treated Gower "as if he were a major poet of Middle English literature deserving critical attention." The pretentiousness of that statement still rocks me.
Nicholson's stated purpose for his reading is to argue that "the principal subject of the Confessio Amantis is human love...most importantly of all, that the moral structure of the poem is the fundamental harmony rather than opposition between God's ethical demands and love's" (vi). Nicholson is pushing back against the more standard reading that Gower's text advocates avoidance and separation from romantic love in favor of following God's love. Rather than following this critical consensus, Nicholson advocates that the Confessio is providing the guidelines for following balanced approach to love, one that fulfills the demands of both God's and romantic love's demands (8). Throughout the rest of his monograph, Nicholson traces these aspects throughout the entirety of Gower's text. For the purposes of time and my own interests, I'll spend the remainder of this post considering his points on Book 5.
According to Nicholson, "Book 5 is Gower's loose baggy monster" (254). Readers approaching this book often have an initial point of confusion due to its wide range of topics (that digress from the confessional structure that had been maintained up to this point), and the book is itself nearly three times as long as those that precede it. While some of the sections, such as the 1200 line discussion of world religions, seem out of place, Nicholson argues that as a whole Book 5 is dedicated to showing the various ways in which Avarice interferes with an ethical approach to love, both romantic and God's love. Interestingly, Nicholson states that it is not the goods themselves that are the root of Avarice, which in this case would extrapolate to Amans' lady as a sexually commodified object, but the unethical approach to obtaining either. For Nicholson, this approach supplants the cynicism of materialistic approaches to love and exchange, "offering...a nobler, redeeming vision both of humanity and of the world" (309). Nicholson's perspective interestingly fits in with the ameliorative shift in the perception of mercantile culture in late medieval England, suggesting not that goods and money are themselves evil but the mishandling there of is.
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