This book is partly about the different ways in which ‘scientific’ knowledge is presented in the two poems of my title. This sentence immediately raises the question as to why one should go to poetry for such knowledge. Surely we should instead go to properly ‘scientific’ texts produced in the periods of these two poems (Anticlaudianus, 1181–3, and 1390–3 for the Confessio amantis)? There we will be able to consult works of psychology, ethics, politics, and cosmology, for example (throughout this book I use the word ‘scientific’ to denote the entire range of academic disciplines available to a given writer). This objection is clearly not without force – a tradition at least as old as Plato has dismissed poetry as having at very best only a secondary philosophic value. Scientific information is best sought where it properly originates, in the academic works of trained philosophers.

Or is it? Certainly if we understand ‘information’ in its modern sense, then the objection might stand: clear expositions of scientific theory by professional academics, in whatever discipline, are the obvious place to look for scientific information. There is no shortage of such works in the respective milieux of both Alan and Gower – Alan, indeed, wrote works at the forefront of late twelfth-century ethics and theology himself. But for both Alan and Gower the word ‘information’ is not half so dull as its modern descendant. A good deal of the argument of this book hinges on this very rich concept, and there follows, accordingly, an account of its semantic range.