John Gower

John Gower (c. 1330–1408) was an English poet, a friend and near-contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote major long poems in three languages: French (Mirour de l'Omme), Latin (Vox Clamantis) and, in his last major work, English. That work, Confessio Amantis (c. 1390), frames a long sequence of moral tales drawn from classical and medieval sources as a lover's confession to a priest of Venus, and was written, by the poem's own account, at the request of King Richard II. Gower spent his later years at the Priory of St Mary Overie in Southwark, where he was buried.