The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought

Abstract

Burrow does not give a detailed account of CA in this book, referring instead to his own earlier essay in Minnis' Responses and Reassessments (1983), but his remarks on Gower's debt to earlier writers, on the uniqueness of his treatment of Amans' old age, and on his later influence are worth reading again in the context of his general treatment of the ages of man in medieval literature. More than any other medieval poem known to me, he writes, Confessio Amantis conveys what it must feel like to be 'senex amans' which is much the same as what it feels like to be any other sort of lover (pp. 160-61). Burrow also adds another text to the list of Gower's sources, the fourteenth-century French poem Les Douze Mois figurez, to which he attributes Amans' comparison of the stages of his life to the twelve months of the year, CA 8.2837- 41. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1]