The Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia, the Epistola to Archbishop Arundel, and John Gower’s Process of Revision

Abstract John Gower composed the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia , the longest of his late, minor Latin poems, ca. 1397 and subsequently revised it by inserting a number of new passages. This essay responds to a recent argument by Robert F. Yeager linking both the first and second versions of the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia to Gower’s Epistola addressed to Archbishop Thomas Arundel, in which Gower presents an unspecified work to Arundel. The Epistola to Arundel itself shows signs of authorial revision, though it survives in only one manuscript. Yeager dates the revision of both poems to ca. 1407. The essay affirms Yeager’s claim that the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia was the work intended for Arundel and makes a study of Gower’s process of revision of these twinned Latin poems. A premise of the essay is that Gower was a compulsive reviser, for whom changes in the political wind were sufficient but not necessary inducements to tinker with what he had written before. His revisions react to both external and internal stimuli. The essay asserts the prime importance of the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia to the last decade of Gower’s career.