- Karma Lochrie,Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy(Philadelphia,
1999 ), 55. - Ad Putter,“Animating Medieval Court Satire,”The Court and Cultural
Diversity, ed. E. Mullally and J. Thompson (Cambridge, 1997 ), 67 – 76 ( 73 ). - C. Stephen Jaeger,“The Barons’Intrigue in Gottfried’sTristan: Notes Toward a
Sociology of Fear in Court Society,”JEGP 83 ( 1984 ), 46 – 66 .“In the face of threat,
insult, and intrigue, the cleric could not reach for his sword, but could only
defend himself by the superiority of his mind and manners, by spinning counter-
intrigues, and in the last resort by appealing to the ruler. But in general clerics
were physically vulnerable in a way that knights were not”( 60 – 61 ). Jaeger
suggests that anticourt polemic originates in the protest of orthodox clergy against
court clergy, who were not strictly part of the church hierarchy and were thus not
subject to episcopal authority. The survival of this distinctively clerical image of
court life is clear inThe Bowge.Drede’s“connynge,”as has been frequently noted,
is often cast back at him by his opponents, in terms alternatelyflattering and
derisive ( 153 – 54 ; 261 ; 447 – 49 ; 454 ), while Disdayne offers a very physical threat to
Drede (“By Goddis syde, my sworde thy berde shall shave!,” 339 ). Drede’sself-
identification encodes the identity of the literate cleric, and thus of the“dull”
author of the prologue, with his secretive clerical hermeneutics. - Winser suggests, on grounds different from those advanced here, that thisfigure
may be Drede’s“own double”( 23 ). Dickey notes the reference back to the
prologue’s anxieties of influence, but assumes the“teder man”to be identical
with Disceyte, a possibility that Skelton’s poem neither confirms nor denies ( 248 ). - Richard Lanham,The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance
(New Haven, 1976 ), 3 – 9. - On the uncanny as response to fear of castration, see Freud,Standard Edition,
xvii,“The Uncanny,” 217 – 56 ( 233 ). - Lacan,Ethics, 163.
- James Simpson has, on different grounds, traced a process by which paranoia is
in this poem ultimately elevated to the status of authority. See“The Death of
the Author?: Skelton’sBouge of Court,”The Timeless and the Temporal:
Writings in Honour of John Chalker by Friends and Colleagues, ed. Elizabeth
Maslen (London, 1993 ), 58 – 77 ( 75 ). - Uhlig,Hofkritik, 175 ; see also Jaeger,Origins, 54 – 66.
- Uhlig,Hofkritik, notes that the commonplace nature of much curial satire
limits its value as historical evidence ( 21 ). - Matthew of Vendôme characterizes Satire’s look as self-consciously devious,
“with oblique eyes attesting to a mind askew”:“Ars Versificatoria,”The Art of
the Versemaker, trans. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee, 1981 ), 63. - The phrase, which is Starkey’s(“Intimacy and Innovation,” 77 ), adapts Sir
Francis Bacon’s well-known remark on Henry VII’s style of rule,“It was...
but keeping of distance, which indeed he did towards all”:History of the Reign
of King Henry VII, ed. J. Rawson Lumby (Cambridge, 1902 ), 214 – 15. - Fish,John Skelton’s Poetry, 79.
- Spearing,Medieval Dream-Poetry, 91.
194 Notes to Pages 57 – 61