Confessio Amantis was, I believe, the first medieval poem to apply the priestly scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins systematically to the cause of love. Since that scheme of the Sins purported to cover the whole of human experience, one might suppose that Gower would have found a great deal to his purpose in treatments of love to be found in the clerical tradition, as if the job were already half done for him there. But this was evidently far from the case. The nearest way to see this is to read Gower's own earlier general treatment of the Sins in his Mirour de l’Omme. The exposition of them there is very long and elaborate, with each of the Seven Sins having five sub-species, or ‘daughters’ as they are called. Many of these daughters bear the same name as species of sin in the Confessio; yet a reader of the Mirour will find very little in it that anticipates the world of the English poem. There is nothing at all under four of the Sins (Anger, Sloth, Covetousness and Gluttony). Under Pride, a single stanza concerns the lover who boasts of a secret love (Mirour, lines 1909–20); and the section on Envy devotes a single stanza, again, to Malebouche, who makes young ladies blush by gossiping about their affairs (Mirour, lines 2701–12). Rather more substantially, the treatment of Foldelit, under Lechery, has 150 lines on the foolish pleasures of young women in love with love and on the young men who languish for them without food or sleep (Mirour, lines 9277–432). But these few passages amount to very little out of a total of 9000 lines. On this evidence – and, I think, on any evidence – Gower had to do most of the work himself when he came in the Confessio to map the scheme of the Seven Sins onto the life of Amans.

Gower's latest project, then, was a challenging one; and I want to touch here on some of the difficulties as well as the opportunities that it presented, sketching out what might be called a cost/benefit analysis.