Nonfiction · 1390
Confessio Amantis
Or, Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins
An aging lover confesses his failures at love, one by one, to a priest of Venus — and each confession draws out a story: tales of pride and envy, wrath and sloth, avarice and gluttony and lust, drawn from classical myth, history and romance, framed as one long medieval examination of conscience in verse.
John Gower composed Confessio Amantis in Middle English around 1390, reportedly at the request of King Richard II; this edition presents G. C. Macaulay's standard critical text, first published in 1900.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1325–1408 · Medieval
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.
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