through the substance ascribed to the sovereign. We might compare Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen’s account of the mimetic ego. Borch-Jacobsen notes that
“Though theegois everywhere in the dream...we still have to recognize
that it is nowhere properly itself, given that it never avoids yielding to an
identification and always confuses itself in some way with another (an alter
ego–but one that is neither other or self).”The ego’sfinding of its own
pleasure requires“a detour, one that causes its own pleasure to pass through
that of another. And this detour is identification (mimesis), resemblance
(homoïosis). One only enjoys, in fantasy, as another: tell me whom you are
miming, and I’ll tell you who you are, what you desire, and how you
enjoy.”^72
Afifteenth-century English version of Alain Chartier’sDialogus familiaris
amici et sodalisrepeats the usual commonplaces about exemplary kingship,
warning the ruler against vice. In so doing, it makes the ruler’s role as
pattern of conduct especially clear:
yt ys a scorneful thynge and a foule spectacle to the comon wele yf men pollute
wyth vyces sytte yn hyghe offyces or estate as though thyr vyces schulde opynly be
schewed and / brought forthe yn syght of the peple. The freel and mevable comonte
lyuen by ensample and folowen the maneres and fortvne of myghty men, but they
put not theyre soules, lawes and ordenaunces made by commaundement so
ryghtfully and wyth so grete reme[m]braunce as they emprynte by ensample the
lyuenge of theyr governour...The lest man [th]at synneth synneth to hymself,
but they whos lyuenge ought to be as ymage and ensample to othyr men, whan they
synne they synne to alle men.^73
The“freel and mevable comonte”live indifferently; they“emprynte by ensam-
plethelyuengeoftheyrgovernour,”replicating the image“opynly...schewed
and / brought forthe yn syght of the peple.”
Suchfigures suggest that in later medieval poetry written around courts,
critique is as likely to emerge in the poem’s own structures and textures as in
the aware and programmatic resistances of historical agents. Richard Firth
Green points to the anomalies of the court poet’s social and economic
position (“some kind of ill-defined no-man’s-land somewhere between a job
and a hobby”), which meant that in general“the lot of English court authors
in the late middle ages was not a very happy one.”^74 A long prior critical
history, much of it antedating the current interest infifteenth-century
English poetics and some of it based in the study of other European
vernacular literatures, had already broached the matter of the court poet’s
desire and its relation to power, working from psychosocial and often
avowedly psychoanalytic paradigms. For Daniel Poirion, nonnoble poets
responding to an alien aristocratic ideal display a“conscience morose du
Introduction 15