The Medieval European Version of‘Kitab Sirr-ul-Asrar,’”Bulletin of the
Faculty of Arts, University of Alexandria 15 ( 1961 ), 83 – 107 ( 95 ). Recent perspec-
tives are provided by Perkins,Hoccleve’s“Regiment of Princes”, 93 – 99 , and
Judith Ferster,Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late
Medieval England(Philadelphia, 1996 ).
67 .In“The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450 – 1500 ”( 1986 ),
Sally Mapstone notes the presence of a“moral and social fusion of thought,”
“the idea of kings as men and as kings”( 116 ), in several advice texts of the
period, and suggests that it connects, by way of the ideology of“common
profit,”with the tone and content of legislation produced at this time by the
Scottish parliament ( 115 ).
68. Shakespeare,Hamlet,iii,i, 61 – 62. On the special powers of the king’s body
politic, see Sir John Fortescue,The Governance of England, ed. Charles
Plummer (Oxford, 1885 ), c.vi, 121 :“the kyngis pover...is no poiar to mowe
synne, and to do ylle, or to mowe to be seke, wex olde, or that a man may hurte
hym self. Ffor all thes poiars comen of impotencie...Wherfore the holy
sprites and angels, that mey not synne, wex old, be seke, or hurte ham selff,
haue more poiar than we, that mey harme owre selff with all thes defautes. So is
the kynges power more...”
69. Thomas Hoccleve,The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo,
1999 ), 2027 – 28.
70. See David Aers,“A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists, or, Reflections on
Literary Critics Writing the‘History of the Subject,’”Culture and History 1350 –
1600 : Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing,ed. David Aers
(Detroit, 1992 ), 177 – 202 ; Lee Patterson,“On the Margin: Postmodernism,
Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,”Speculum 65 ( 1990 ), 87 – 108.
71. I do not here overlook the extent to which this self-scrutiny is alreadyfigured in
other discourses, in particular those–in many ways cognate–of the confes-
sional and penitential writing, and of the literature offin amour. On the
devotional self, see now Jennifer Bryan,Looking Inward: Devotional Reading
and the Private Self in Late Medieval England(Philadelphia, 2008 ). Lee
Patterson points out that“medieval anthropology defined the subject as
desire...asamor, an inward sense of insufficiency that drives the Christian
self forward on its journey through the historical world”:Chaucer and the
Subject of History(London, 1991 ), 8.
72. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter
(Stanford, 1988 ), 21.
73 .A Familiar Dialogue of the Friend and the Fellow: A Translation of Alain
Chartier’s“Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis,”ed. Margaret S. Blayney,
EETS OS 295 (Oxford, 1989 ), 21. For the original, see Pascale Bourgain-
Hemeryck, ed.,Les Oeuvres latines d’Alain Chartier(Paris, 1977 ), 245 – 325 ( 282 ).
74. Green,Poets and Princepleasers, 12 , 203.
75. Poirion,Poète et le prince, 175 – 77.
76. Zumthor writes that“The poet’s role on the court stage is to be the delegate of
the prince himself: this act of delegation can be revoked at any time but,
182 Notes to Pages 14 – 16