its culmination in print.“The typographic revolution,”Berger writes,“is at
once the consequence, the catalyst, and the symbol of the general rift
between the order of the body and the order of texts that characterizes
early modern culture.”For the poets I discuss below, who work in both
script and print, such rifts and their consequences are writ especially large.
My third andfinal point here might best be described as a corollary of the
first two. All the poems I discuss here concern themselves with identifica-
tory desire and with power, and mostfigure that desire through popular
amatory modes: romance, lyric, dialogue, complaint. The statutory tropes
offin amour, guarantees of that secrecy which is the traditional reflex of
aristocratic privilege, move in printed works into a wider cultural domain,
to become the open secrets of secret subjects. Such amatory matter con-
stantly moves into abrasive contact with other genres, as the texts reach in
different discursive directions in order to close the sense of loss generated by
failed identification. Their narrators are traumatized by abrupt and uncanny
shifts of register and genre, vividly fantasized episodes of paranoia, appeals
to genres with all-inclusive truth claims and truth-effects. In particular, we
find gestures towards moments of unusually violent closure: narrators
contemplate or enact their own deaths, or threaten apocalyptic vengeance.
In this very violence, and between the differing generic commitments of
these poems–the most accurate registers of what was once called an age of
“transition”–a residue of disquiet evades articulation and exerts its silent
pressure on language.
18 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland