ABSTRACT
John Gower seems to have been the first English literary author to create an illustration program for his work. In this he was preceded, and may have been inspired, by the French author Guillaume de Machaut. Machaut personally oversaw the creation of a series of collected-works manuscripts, based on a master copy he kept of his texts. 1 Scholars have speculated that the earliest of these anthologies was in the possession of Jean II of France when the French king was in captivity in England, following his defeat at the Battle of Poitiers (1356). The discussion tends to focus on whether Geoffrey Chaucer might have seen this manuscript between May 1357 and April 1359, when King Jean was being hosted by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in Gaunt’s residence near Westminster. 2 If Chaucer might have seen the book, however, so might Gower. King Jean’s copy of Machaut’s collected works survives as Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1586. It contains 107 illuminations, many of which feature an author-persona as part of the story’s action. 3
