Such sudden and unprepared movements from speaking lover to
speaking book and back tend to be explained away either as authorial
ineptitude (Hawes is a careless user of late-medieval narratorial devices) or
as an innocently“medieval”cultural redundancy (Hawes the medieval
author simply fails to make the distinctions a modern reader wouldfind
natural). They slowly acquire an importance of their own, however,
for apparent discontinuity at the level of narratorial voice becomes a
more inclusive continuity at the level of the printed book. The sense of
the book itself as a larger unit, affiliated to other kinds of book, is
as prominent as the narratorialfiction of Graunde Amoure. Afictional
character from the realm of love-literature progresses through and past
blocks of nonnarrative didactic matter, an illusion the woodcuts that
articulate the early editions of the poem help to sustain.^20 In the poem’s
diffusely overlapping discourses and voices, distinctions between narrato-
rial roles, genres and even writer and reader fold back into a general
identification of the lover’s desire with the writer’s–and the reader’s–
physical progress through the book. And this in turn generates a comple-
mentary process by which the lover’sdesireisglossedinvariousways,
as the poem’s citation of a multiplicity of genres–the pilgrimage, the
literature of Fame, the popular encyclopaedia, didactic and love-allegory,
romance–doubles back on it.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the explicit parallels drawn between
Amoure’sfirst encounter with Pucell and rhetoricalinventio. Dame Rhetoric
has lectured Amoure on the respective contributions toinventioof the
“.v. inwarde wyttes”( 703 ).“Comyn wytte”( 706 ) selects the basic matter,
and“ymagynacyon”is responsible for its amplification ( 708 – 09 ),“Clokynge
a trouthe with colour tenebrous”( 712 ).“Fantasy”( 722 ),“good estymacyon”
( 736 )and“the retentyfe memory”( 750 ) also play their parts. When Amoure
meets Pucell at the Tower of Music, these functions are recalled:
The comyn wyt dyde full lytell regarde
Of dame musyke; the dulcet armony
The eres herde not, for the mynde inwarde
Venus had rapte, and taken feruently.
Ymagynacyon wrought full pryuely.
The fantasy gaue perfyte Iugement
Alway to to [sic] her for to be obedyent.
By estymacyon, moche doubtfully I cast
Wheder I shoulde by longe tyme and space
Atteyne her loue, or else to loue in wast. ( 1485 – 94 )Mémoires d’outre-tombe 113