Scholarship in Anglo-Iberian relations developed during the second half of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first century to such an extent that few readers would subscribe today to the often quoted statement made in 1906 by the eminent hispanophile James Fitzmaurice-Kelly about the “almost complete insulation of each country with regard to one another” in the Middle Ages, or his other affirmation that “the first step to sustained intellectual commerce” started at the end of the fifteenth century, in allusion to the thirteen Fables of Alfonce (by the Aragonese Jewish convert, Pedro Alfonso, or Petrus Alphonsus) which were included in the 1483 edition of Caxton's Aesop. María Bullón-Fernández, among others, has also drawn our attention to this fact. Two historians in the 1950s had indeed opened the ground for new views in relation to the fourteenth century: the Spanish medievalist Luis Suárez Fernández and the Oxford scholar Peter E. Russell, although in more recent years the current interest in Al-Andalus as a decisive factor in the conformation of Europe and European culture has yielded books such as those by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman, Sharon Kinoshita, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, or, some decades earlier, one by Alice E. Lasater.

My purpose in this chapter is not to focus on this latter sort of exploration, but rather to look back again on the particular historical, political, and dynastic conditions that linked England to Iberia during the fourteenth century, a period when writers such as John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Canciller Pero López de Ayala lived and composed their best known works.

Venus's dismissal of John Gower at the end of the Confessio Amantis ostensibly represents the end of his dual career as a lover and an author. Freed from his “trance” (CA VIII.2813) and shocked into recognition by the mirror rendering an accurate “liknesse of miselve” (CA VIII.2437), the poet receives a rosary of black beads with the gold inscription “Por reposer” (CA VIII.2907) and a new commission, to seek and pray for peace. This scene is echoed in the Confessio's explicit, literally the final words, in which the poet's book is sent to find lasting repose under the earl of Derby: sub eo requiesce futurus. Other elements of the poem, however, belie this sense of closure. Venus directs Gower not just to erotic and poetic retirement but to his own works: “But go ther vertu moral duelleth, | where ben thi bokes, as men telleth, | Which of long time thou has write” (CA VIII.2925–27). His literary destination is the Mirour de l'Omme and the Vox Clamantis, works that treat ethics, have found an audience influential enough to be proverbial (“as men telleth”), and were written “of long time” – both in the authoritative past and through a long process of composition and conceptual development.