Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a detailed engagement with
theEneadositself, though it should be pointed out that I do notfind the
“imperialist” reading of theEneados, for all Douglas’s words about his
aspiration to“the knychtlyke stile”(Prol.ix: 31 ), fully sustainable. The
Eneados, with its elaborate apparatus of prologues refashioning the clerical
accessus ad auctores,^4 is, to be sure,firmly assertive about its ambitions to
extend Virgilian epic reach into“thelangage of Scottis natioun”(Prol.i:
103 ). It is, however, inescapably caught up in the instabilities of translation
and temporality; if theauctor, as has been claimed, doubles Aeneas’s
wanderings, this is the inevitable fate of an epic subject haunted throughout
thetranslatio imperiiby“the narcissism thatisexile.”^5 My intent here is to
examineThe Palice’s own temporal relation totranslatio. In its relation to
theEneados, it is at once proleptic and retrospective, a bid to accommodate,
and yet disavow, the foreshadowings of epic desire in the erotic desire of
allegorical dream vision and its language.The Palicethus becomes some-
thing of an anacrusis to the national and imperial ambitions of Scots in the
Eneados.
This chapter, however, also imitates the early moderncursus honorumof
Virgilian genres by turningfirst to a set of eclogues, those by Alexander
Barclay. Barclay’s ecclesiastical connexions offer a more jagged trajectory
than Douglas’s. Written, as far as can be determined, between 1509 and
1514 , Barclay’sEcloguesare the work of a monk whose monastic affiliations
are, Lydgate-like, involved in other parts of the public sphere: the designs
for the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1521 , the print shop of Richard Pynson.
Barclay discovers elements of what will come to be known as“nation”
within the folds of a translated,“eclogic”clerical imaginary, whereas for
Douglas the national abuts on to a projected epic space, a horizon that in
The Paliceis at once all-encompassing and–for the time being–absent.

stark pastoral

Perhaps even more than Skelton, it is Alexander Barclay whose career asks
with a special insistence where culture is located in thefirst two decades of
the sixteenth century, throwing the plurality of markets and jurisdictions
into clear relief. Ordained and appointed to a title (guaranty of support) by
the collegiate church of Ottery St. Mary in Devon, he became a Benedictine
monk of Ely Cathedral priory in 1513 , evidently leaving it to enter the
Franciscan order at some point between 1521 and 1528. His monastic
identity, however, was in dialogue with multiple patrons and institutions.^6
Most of his works were produced in close collaboration with Richard

88 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland