defended Henry and attacked the conventional “doubleness” of the
French.^2 The fullest contemporary account of the matter, in Bernard
André’sVita Henrici Septimi, gives some idea of the diversity of the group
involved in this coincidence of Tudor political ambition with the long
fifteenth-century record of humanist speculation in English patronage.^3
Giovanni Gigli (“vir profecto divinarum humanarumque rerum peritissi-
mus”[“a man very expert indeed in divine and human affairs”]), born
around 1434 , had received ecclesiastical preferment from Edward IV, and
would do so again under Henry VII. Pietro Carmeliano,“orator et poeta
clarissimus”[“a most renowned poet and orator”], and Cornelio Vitelli,
“facundissim[us] orator”[“an orator most eloquent”], were more recent
arrivals; Carmeliano had capitalized on his humanist training and skills to
become a royal secretary after a fallow period under Richard III, Vitelli was
one of thefirst humanists to teach at Oxford.^4 André, however, is–on his
showing–the outstandingfigure here:
Et nos quoque, qui de grege poetarum sumus, non paucos ut illi, sed pene ducentos
in illum debacchati sumus, quippe nil audacius est malo poeta. Primum igitur
heroicis fere quinquaginta, quorum initium:
“Phoebe pater, jam, Phoebe, veni: fas antra movere Delia.”
Post, elegis:
“Nestoris annosi,”etc.
Item aliis sic initientibus:
“Puppis ad Oenopiam,”etc.
Iterum aliis hendecasyllabis,“Cum tot sustineas”; quorumfinem hic apposui
propter memoriam, seu majus jactantiam:
“Miles gaudet equis, colonus agris
Venator canibus, poeta musis;
Sic urit sua quemlibet voluptas.”( 57 )
[And we too, who belong to thisflock of poets, raged madly against [Gaguin],
not with a few verses, as did the others, but with nearly two hundred–for no one
is bolder than a bad poet:first in almostfifty hexameters, which began with“Father
Apollo, now, Apollo, come: there is cause to rouse the Delian oracle”; next, in
elegiacs:“Of aged Nestor”; again, in others beginning thus:“The ship to Oenopia,”
etc.; again in others, hendecasyllabics:“Since you suffer so much,”the end of which
I set here to call them to mind, or rather to boast about them:“The knight takes joy
in horses, the farmer infields, the hunter in hounds, the poet in the muses; thus
does his own pleasurefire each man.”]
While André and his peers compete for favor from a royal English patron
who bestows on them actual and potential subsidy, this vertical model is offset
by a contest among rival-doubles for the prestige conferred by success in a
20 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland