John Gower, whose work is favorably compared by contemporaries with that of his friend Geoffrey Chaucer, writes in Latin and French, but his masterpiece is the long (thirty-three thousand lines), formal, didactic poem in English, Confessio Amantis, a blend of contemporary learning with classical stories often taken from the Latin poet Ovid, in which the poet discusses the Seven Deadly Sins and also develops the theme of courtly love with great rhetorical skill and subtlety.

It stands with the works of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl poet as one of the great works of late fourteenth-century English literature.

Composition of the work probably began around 1386, and the work is completed in 1390.

The prologue of this first recension recounts that the work was commissioned by Richard II after a chance meeting with the royal barge on the River Thames; the epilogue dedicates the work to Richard and to Geoffrey Chaucer, as the "disciple and poete" of Venus.

This version of the work saw widespread circulation, perhaps due to its royal connections (Peck 2000), and is the most popular of Gower's works, with at least thirty-two of the forty-nine surviving manuscripts of the Confessio containing this version.

In genre it is usually considered a poem of consolation, a medieval form inspired by Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and typified by works such as Pearl.

Despite this, it is more usually studied alongside other tale collections with similar structures, such as the Decameron of Boccaccio, and particularly Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with which the Confessio has several stories in common.