Confessio Amantis

Confessio Amantis (Latin for "The Lover's Confession") is a long poem written in Middle English by the fourteenth-century English poet John Gower (c. 1325–1408) and the only major work he composed in English. The poem unfolds through a frame narrative: Amans (Latin for "lover"), an aged lover, prays to Venus and Cupid in May and then confesses to Venus's priest Genius, recounting one by one his sins in love. Following the Christian tradition of confession, the priest Genius guides him through the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lechery—telling a series of moral tales for each, most adapted from classical myth, historical legend, and medieval romance, such as the stories of Actaeon and Diana, Medusa, the Trojan Horse and Florent, and the tale of Constance. Book VII contains a long digression on Aristotle's education of Alexander the Great and on the principles of good rule. At the end, Venus recognizes that Amans has grown old and that his pursuit of love can come to nothing; he therefore turns back to religion and to concern for the commonwealth. Didactic in purpose, the work combines the playfulness of courtly love, political allegory, and a rich fund of story, and stands with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a major classic of Middle English literature.