ABSTRACT
Compared with the scholarly attention paid to Gower’s French manuscripts over the years, the manuscripts containing his English and Latin poems, of which there are a significant number extant, have had a robust history. Not surprisingly, scholarly work related to the French manuscripts, of which there remain far fewer, has been limited. Only one manuscript is known to contain solely French poetry: Cambridge University Library Additional MS 3035, the single manuscript containing the Mirour de l’Omme. Gower’s other two surviving French works, the Cinkante Balades and the Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz, are included in manuscripts with poems in other languages. The Cinkante Balades survives only in London, British Library MS Additional 59495 (olim the “Trentham Manuscript”), itself a collection including some of Gower’s English and Latin poems (including the only surviving versions of the English “In Praise of Peace” and the Latin poems “Ecce patet tensus,” “Quicquid homo scribat,” and copies of the Latin “Rex celi deus,” “O recolende,” and “H. aquile pullus”). Thus only the poems of the Traitié appear in more than one manuscript. Besides the “Trentham Manuscript,” where it follows the Cinkante Balades, the Traitié is known from nine manuscripts containing the Confessio Amantis and two with the Vox Clamantis. I address the current state of manuscript study of each of these poems below.
