labeur”[“a morose consciousness of labour”] in which we hear“le grince-
ment d’insurmontables contradictions”[“the creaking of insurmountable
contradictions”].^75 Most immediately relevant to the latefifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, Paul Zumthor’sgrands rhétoriqueurs, their bodies and
words signs of the prince’sgloire, can take refuge from the vulnerabilities of
patronage only in punning, equivocal subversion of the verbal sign itself.^76
In 1985 , Fradenburg provided an anticipatory check to overly sanguine
voluntarisms, reminding us that the presentation of the court poem as gift
rather than as paid labor“goes over and above the actual meanings of the
poem to designate these meanings asforthe master.”^77 She also points out
that“The desire of the patronized poet of the later Middle Ages does
not ...exist solely in opposition to the‘exigencies of the political’; the
desire of the poet is intertwined with the political demand, defining it,
defined by it as well as by resistance to it, seized of its weapons and seized by
them.”^78 We may recall that Lacan’s model of the ego’s formation links
identification with the mirror image with a fundamental alienation from the
image, misrecognition of an imaginary coherence with aggressiveness.^79 It
need not surprise us that in courtly writing, too, identification with images
and languages of power interweave with traces of a muted, stifled resent-
ment and with a sense that the subject speaking these texts does not inhabit
them with complete assurance or certainty.
Our discussion has moved between identification with the monarch,
with the authoritative voices of literary style and genre, and with specific
authors, all functioning, often simultaneously, as modes of self-
authentication. It should not, then, surprise us that political obedience
could itself be seen as a form of literaryimitatio, as Chartier once again
illustrates:
For looke wher a prince is withow(t) wisedom there be the people withowte
discipline, for and a booke be falsly wretyn it shall make the reders for to erre,
and he that wrytith aftir that booke ioyneth false vpon false. So thanne the kynge is
the booke of the people wherein thei shulde lerne to lyve and amende their maners.
But and the originall be corrupt / thanne by the copyes vntrewely wretyn. For the
corrupcion that descendith from the hede chavefith the lyvir, chargith the harte and
filith the stomacke; it stoppith thentrailes and alterith all the body.^80
Here, the prince is truly the origin and ground of his subjects’being: his
physiological status as“hede”makes him an exemplar both textual and
moral, even as he shares the same body with“the people.”Like Freud,
Chartier draws on the language of book production to describe the process
of identification. Where poetry is concerned, the presence of“corrupt
16 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland