Chapter 10 - Se-duction and Sovereign Power in Gower’s Confessio Amantis Book V

Summary

In book V of the Confessio Amantis Gower surprisingly compares perjury, a serious crime in the king's court, to amatory seduction, a lesser moral offence which ecclesiastical courts ranked in importance well behind rape and adultery. These dissimilar wrongdoings share a motive – ‘coveitise’, which, according to MED, means both ‘immoderate desire for acquiring worldly goods or estate’ and ‘strong sexual desire’ for women. The comparison between lands and women as objects of desire is warranted by men's proprietary interest in their sisters’, wives’ or daughters’ chastity:

… Sicut agros cupidus dum querit amans mulieres, Vult testes falsos falsus habere suos. Non sine vindicta periurus abibit in eius Visu, qui cordis intima cuncta videt. Fallere periuro non est laudanda puellam Gloria, set false condicionis opus.

(In the same way, a cupidinous lover seeks women as if he were seeking lands: he desires his own false witnesses. But not without punishment will the perjurer live in the sight of whoever sees all the secrets of his heart. To deceive a girl by perjury is not a praiseworthy glory but an action of false contract.)

The Latin (‘sicut … agros … mulieres’) supports the fusion of sexual and property desire and also the subsequent transformation of ‘cupidus amans’ into ‘periurus’, whose epithet is echoed to emphasize his wrongdoing (‘periuro’). These lines, which introduce the tales of Confessio book V, preface Gower's intriguing contention that seduction and perjury might be legally equivalent. Yet even if one equates the objects of their desire, perjury and seduction are hardly alike: unlike the property thief, the covetous lover (‘cupidus amans’) might escape punishment and even take pride (‘laudanda gloria’) in his sexual conquests. Widespread misogynist views of women as tempting daughters of Eve ensured modest penalties for medieval seducers. Ecclesiastic courts levied small fines, occasionally flogging those perpetrators who were either unwilling to marry their victims or too poor to pay compensation.