Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian
Tradition(Cambridge, 1994 ), 298 – 350. Maura Nolan describes a Lydgate who
emerges“less as a subject, and more as an aesthetic function”:John Lydgate and the
Making of Public Culture(Cambridge, 2005 ), 10 – 14 ,and“‘Nowwo,nowglad-
nesse’:OvidianisminThe Fall of Princes,”ELH 71 ( 2004 ), 531 – 58 ( 536 ).
33. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of
Legitimation 1399 – 1422 (New Haven, 1998 ), 194 – 95.
34. Robert Meyer-Lee,Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt(Cambridge, 2007 ).
35. R. F. Yeager,John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion(Cambridge,
1990 ), 234. See too J. A. Burrow,“The Portrayal of Amans inConfessio
Amantis,”Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J.
Minnis (Cambridge, 1983 ), 5 – 24 ; Zeeman,“Verse of Courtly Love.”
36 .The English Works of John Gower,ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols., EETS ES 81 , 82
(London, 1900 – 01 ). All further references to theConfessio Amantisare to this
edition, and are by book and line number.
37. For recent treatments, see Sian Êchard,“Pre-Texts: Tables of Contents and the
ReadingofJohnGower’sConfessio Amantis,”Medium Ævum 66 ( 1997 ), 270 – 87 ;
Frank Grady,“Gower’s Boat, Richard’sBarge,andtheTrueStoryoftheConfessio
Amantis: Text and Gloss,”Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 ( 2002 ), 1 – 15.
38. For Chaucer’s importance as vernacular authority in Hoccleve’s poem, see
Larry Scanlon,“The King’s Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve’s
The Regement of Princes,”Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380 –
1530 , ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, 1990 ), 210 – 47 ( 226 , 233 – 42 ). On the
Lancastrian promotion of the English language, see John H. Fisher,The
Emergence of Standard English (Lexington, 1996 ), 16 – 35 , and Malcolm
Richardson,“Henry V, the English Chancery, and Chancery English,”
Speculum 55 ( 1980 ), 726 – 50. On the“Lancastrian poetics”of literature and
nation, see Green,Poets and Princepleasers, 187 – 90 ; Paul Strohm,“Saving the
Appearances: Chaucer’s‘Purse’and the Fabrication of the Lancastrian Claim,”
Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts(Princeton,
1992 ), 75 – 94 , andEngland’s Empty Throne.
39. John Lydgate,The Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS ES 121 – 24
(London, 1924 – 27 ). All references are to this edition, and are by book and line
number.
40. The most noteworthy instance appears in BL MS Additional 29729 , fol. 177 v:
his nobles bene spent / I leue ychon
and eke his shylinges nyghe by
his thred bare coule / woll not ly
ellas ye lordis / why nill ye se
and reward his pouerte ( 40 – 44 )
This is cited in Eleanor Prescott Hammond, ed.,English Verse Between
Chaucer and Surrey(Durham, 1927 ). On Shirley, see Margaret Connolly,
John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century
England(Aldershot, 1998 ).178 Notes to Pages 6 – 8