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Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). viii + 441 pp. ISBN 0-472-11512-X. £46.00/$80.00.
Peter Nicholson's Love and Ethics in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis', weighing in at close to 450 pages, mightily qualifies as what would once have been deemed 'a hefty tome'. Especially given the reluctance these days of publishers to commit to books of such size, it says much about the risen status of Gower studies internationally that the University of Michigan Press backed this capacious project, composed in a style of 'forty years ago', as Nicholson himself has it in his preface (p. v). (By this he apparently means 'close reading'.) But like all fine books, which are themselves their own best recommendation, Nicholson's study needs no external hand-up from a burgeoning critical interest in Gower and his writing. Love and Ethics in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' speaks up for itself, confidendy, often eloquently, thoroughly justifying its substantial heft. Taking as his starting point the notion that a half-century of focus on Gower's poem as a political document is quite enough, Nicholson sets out 'to argue that the principal subject of the Confessio Amantis is human love; that Amans is a quite ordinary mortal with his share of virtues as well as sins; that the issue in the poem is not whether Amans should be in love...