Chaucer, Gower, and Barbarian History: “The Man of Law’s Tale” and the Prologue to Gower’s Confessio Amantis

Abstract

This chapter argues that both Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower looked to barbarian history as a source for narrative and a mirror for their own times. Gower’s sweeping prologue to the Confessio Amantis uses both the biblical prophecy of the four empires in the book of Daniel and the historian Otto of Freising to portray a complex tableau where the Roman Empire , the fourth of Daniel’s four realms, is indefinitively extended, but also subject to diminution and decay. The chapter concludes by comparing how Gower explores the post-Carolingian history of the Lombard emperors to Chaucer’s sourcing of an earlier Lombard era, of Paul the Deacon, in constructing the Mediterranean tableau of “The Man of Law’s Tale,” whose barbarian history extends from Eastern princesses to Anglo-Saxon converts.