MEPconfessio

The Confessio Amantis
By Ashley



	"Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present "the present time which now is" as Gower puts it. The present is, for Gower, a state of mind every bit as much as the past or future must be. And it is for this reason that the tales must be told and "experienced." Just as the past must be perpetually reinvented (and Gower is a master at such invention), so too must the present be perpetually reinvented if one is to have any notion of oneself in a locatable way. One claims the present by locating it within the terms of memory. In his tale telling, Gower enters into a refined phenomenology where time, history, memory, and a fictionalizing of the past make discourse of the "now"-world presentable. " http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/caintro.htm