John Gower described his Anglo-French Mirour de l'Omme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and the Middle English Confessio Amantis as ‘three books’ composed ‘for the sake of doctrine’, and critics have noted the degree to which these books speak to each other. Not only do these three poems address similar concerns and draw on the same discursive traditions, but Gower also habitually recycled specific source material across the Mirour, the Vox, and the Confessio. ‘In a very real sense’, John Fisher concludes, ‘Gower's three major poems are one continuous work … that provide[s] as organized and unified a view as we have on the social ideals of England on the eve of the Renaissance.’ The coherence Fisher locates in Gower's oeuvre, however, testifies to the division that characterized his world and permeated his poetry. From the start of the Mirour during the halcyon days of Edward III's triumphs over France, through the Vox 's account of Richard II's troubled reign, to the Henrician revisions of the Confessio, Gower wrestled with the problem of social, political, and religious division and his responses to these crises remain critical questions animating the study of Gower's oeuvre. Throughout these debates, one figure looms particularly large: Richard II.

This article argues that Gower's representation of the ethics and aesthetics of English kingship emerges alongside and in conversation with a much larger transnational crisis: the Western Schism (1378–1417). Though Gower may present the Confessio as a ‘bok for Engelondes sake’ (CA, P.24), he figures the Schism in universalizing terms that encompass ‘ous alle’:

The ‘slitte’ that cut the western church in half between 1378 and 1417 carved all of Europe into rival camps, loyal to either the Urbanist (Rome) or Clementine (Avignon) pope. Torn between ‘tuo stoles’, the Schism compromised ‘the most important mark of the vera ecclesia ’: unity. While the Schism of 1378 was hardly the first division in the Western Church, the attempt of Clement VII, born Robert of Geneva (r. 1378–94), to displace Urban VI (r. 1378–89) was fundamentally different from earlier conflicts over the papacy. Unlike those previous disputes, this crisis was a product of internal stress rather than external interference.