ABSTRACT
224 225Few writers have been as ostentatiously multilingual as John Gower. Not only did he write well in three languages – Latin, French, and English – but he wrote a lot: the Vox Clamantis runs to about 10,000 lines, the Mirour de l’Omme to about 30,000, and the Confessio Amantis to about 33,000. In all three languages, Gower composed shorter works as well, such as the Cronica Tripertita, the Cinkante Balades, and In Praise of Peace. By comparison, Chaucer’s entire Canterbury Tales totals fewer than 20,000 lines, however one counts the prose. And although there are longer English poems than the Confessio – Lydgate’s Fall of Princes exceeds 36,000 lines – there are not many, while the Vox and the Mirour stand at the front of, respectively, the Anglo-Latin and Anglo-French poetic records.
