This Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis has been long in the making. The origins of the project were coeval with the publication in 1978 of the seminal article by Malcolm Parkes and Ian Doyle on the scribes of the copy of the Confessio Amantis in Trinity College Cambridge, which opened a new window on the production practices behind the professional copying of late medieval Middle English poetry. At this point Derek Pearsall, at the University of York, started to develop the idea of a catalogue of Gower manuscripts with three young graduate students: Jeremy Griffiths, then working in Oxford on the scribes of the Gower manuscripts under the supervision of Malcolm Parkes; Kate Harris, working on a D.Phil. thesis on the early reception of Gower’s Confessio with Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall at York; and Jeremy Smith, working in Glasgow with Michael Samuels on the language of the Gower manuscripts. The model for the manuscript descriptions, adopted at the outset on the advice of Jeremy Griffiths and still surviving in the present catalogue, is indebted to the work of Malcolm Parkes.

At this early stage, it was intended to encompass the entire corpus of manuscripts preserving the works of the trilingual poet, including his major French poem the Mirour de l’Omme and his Latin work, the Vox clamantis. Supporting the ambition to advance the understanding of the production history of Gower’s oeuvre was a plan (funded by the British Academy) to commission photographs of examples of the work of all scribes involved in the production of copies of Gower’s poems. As this early ambition remains to be fulfilled and has of recent years become a focus of more controversy than is usual in the case of palaeographical studies, it is hoped that the collection of images accrued at this time may at some point be made available in a public repository to facilitate further investigation.

Originally the hope was that some further insight into the poet’s work over time on the Confessio, creating, then revising, his poem, might be gained, and targeted collation of the text was part of the original remit for work on each manuscript copy of the English poem.