The arrival of the grex poetarum marked a significant moment in
the history of relations between Latin and a vernacular which, for all the
political and ideological weight it had gathered in the course of the
fifteenth century, could not easily aspire to Latin’s cultural title.^8 André
came to England shortly after Richard III’s defeat at Bosworth Field, and
quickly began to serve as the new regime’s unofficial propagandist. By
November 1486 he had entered the records as“poeta laureatus”and was
receiving an annuity, and he is the recorded recipient of many payments to
“Master Bernard the blynde poete.”^9 The Gaguin episode, of course, is as
much about André’s professional self-promotion as about his solidarity
with a professional clique. As a member of thegrexhe is quite egregious,
firing off four poems in a dizzying variety of meters (and his experimenta-
tion with classical meters does in fact mark him off from his contempo-
raries in England),^10 whereas Carmeliano, Gigli and Vitelli, admittedly on
his evidence, modestly make do with one each. He further quotes the
opening lines of the other poems in order to “frame” their authors,
illustrating, in the most casual fashion, the greater density of classical
allusion in his own incipits( 55 – 56 ). Bourdieu’s notion of a“profitof
distinction” does double duty here:^11 if the Latinists are purveying a
commodity distinct enough to put them in unusual demand, André offers
the distinction of distinction.
André’s lines, however, offer other seductions. His wild cumulation of
metrical possibilities displays a craftsman in charge of his matter, but also
comes very close to suggesting the opposite: a delirious yielding, a self-
dispersal into these (in England at least) exotic patterns. We return to his
own conclusion: what are the pleasures that“fire”his poetry? On the
reading of David Carlson, who has done more than anyone to make these
poets visible, they would hardly be legible, for thegrexare nothing but signs.
“We cannot know”Carlson writes,“whether Bernard André was without
sight,”since thefigure of the blindvates“ha[s] no existence except as [a]
functional location...in a system of cultural-political relations in place in
England at the time.”^12 Several other essays by Carlson have shown what
this system entailed. These authors from outside England initiate, as I have
already noted, a very direct break in genre and allusion with prevalent
Englishfifteenth-century models of“public”poetic discourse. In the cluster
of birthday poems written to Prince Arthur in 1486 , Arthur’s advent comes
in the trappings of Virgilian and Horatian messianism, Henry is a“trium-
phator,”and London becomes ancient Rome, its plebs celebrating the new
order with cries of“yo Paean”while its bards strum with their plectra.
Discontinuity, as Carlson notes, is the order of the day; the reign of the Tudors
22 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland