Certain manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis have long been famous for the high quality of their texts. G. C. Macaulay characterized the Fairfax manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, the base manuscript for his edition) “as a practically accurate reproduction of the author’s original text,” stated that British Library, Harley MS 3869 is “copied very faithfully from the Fairfax manuscript itself,” and viewed the Stafford manuscript (San Marino, Huntington Library, EL 26.A.17) as “in most places […] absolutely the same [as Fairfax], letter for letter.” Not all manuscripts measured up to Macaulay’s high standards; he found that “in correctness of text and spelling [Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 609] is decidedly inferior;” while a “careless third hand” in Geneva, Fondation Bodmer, MS 178 (known to Macaulay as the manuscript of J. H. Gurney) displays “at least twenty variations in spelling” compared with Fairfax in the space of ten lines. The carefulness of Fairfax, Stafford, and Harley 3869, among others, continues to be remarked upon. Since its inception in the 1950s, the Middle English Dialect Project, whose fruits have been published in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (henceforth LALME) and elsewhere, has given us a vocabulary to think about such manuscripts and their scribes. Angus McIntosh, instigator of the project, proposed three “types” of scribal response to an exemplar not in the scribe’s own dialect:

Developed by Michael Benskin and Margaret Laing, McIntosh’s Type A is called “literatim” copying, while Type B is “translation” copying. Texts of Type C, having elements of both methods, are said to be in mixed languages (Mischsprachen). Using the analytical terms of LALME, Michael Samuels and Jeremy Smith characterized Gower’s own language as a Mischsprache that combines forms from Suffolk (where Gower had family ties) and Kent (where Gower lived for some of his youth). Smith has observed that “An unusually high proportion of the texts of the Confessio Amantis can be shown to be in whole or in part literatim copies, i.e. letter-for-letter reproductions of exemplars.” These literatim copies preserve the mixture of dialect forms thought to reflect Gower’s own idiolect.