• Introduction


• 1: The great household and an economics of power


• 2: The political economy in the late fourteenth century


• 3: Service allegory: the great household in Genius's confession


• 4: Courtly love and the lordship of Venus


• 5: Women as household exchange in Genius's tales


• 6: Justice and the affinity


• 7: Retribution as household exchange in Genius's tales


• 8: Total reciprocity and the problem of kingship


• Conclusion

In a sustained new reading of John Gower's major English poem, Confessio Amantis (1390-3), Elliot Kendall shows how deeply the great household shaped the way Gower and his contemporaries (including Chaucer, Clanvowe, chroniclers, and parliamentary petitioners) imagined their world.