The margins in the Iberian manuscripts of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis": language, authority and readership

Abstract

The pages of the Confessio Amantis display an interesting blend of English text and Latin commentary in which the Latin apparatus enhances the vernacular text forming a strongly interrelated entity. The Latin captions and the glosses in the Confessio appear in a remarkably regular way in the English manuscripts and the presentation of the elements in the pages follows, in general, a pre-established pattern of marginal and in-column annotations.However, the Iberian translations of the Confessio translated the Latin captions and skipped most of the marginal annotations, leaving behind an integral part of the work that probably carne from Gower himself. In a work such as the Confessio Amantis, in which bilingualism is central to the text as planned by its author, the absence of all the Latin elements results in an important change in the textual dynamics of the poem. Why did they fail to cross the geographical borders in an era when Latin was lingua franca? What does their absence te\l us about the origin of the translations and their intended readership?