perpetually overdetermined signifier with respect to which man is always at
risk.”No more than the woman of medieval antifeminism can the lord get it
right.^24 There is an excess of unregulated physical proximity; when the court
travels, one is liable to share a bed with people who fart or scratch themselves
all night, or even with a leper ( 3 : 83 – 110 ). And Barclay goes further than his
source in describing the likelihood that at dinner you may get mutilated
by the knives of your fellow courtiers:“Ofte in such dishes in court is it
seene. / Some leaue theirfingers, eche knife is so kene”( 2 : 981 – 82 ). At the
base of court existence lie fragmentation and an excruciating carnality. We
are a long way from the court as the cradle of civility, and the world where the
real is increasingly elaborated by the courtesy book’s symbolic.^25
Now we witness a curious doubling of this effect in Barclay’s relationship to
his source. At the beginning of the Eclogues, Barclay partially translates
Mantuan (who called his eclogues hisAdulescentia)tosignalwithfullpost-
classical decorum that his pastoral poems are literary prentice-work (Prol. 1 –
102 ;cf. 69 – 76 with Mantuan’s prefatory letter to Paride Ceresara). His trans-
lation stages an associated reversion. In theDe Miseriis, Piccolomini laments
that there are few clerics nowadays who do not follow Epicureanism, and
affirmsthiswithaquotationfromCicero’sPro Caelio;^26 while Cicero and a
few others will think the gods favor a man who can avoid the temptations of
the senses, all of which Cicero lists, the majority are more likely to believe that
such a man has incurred divine anger (“huic homini ego fortasse et pauci deos
propitios, plaerique autem iratos putabunt”[“such a man I and some few
others may account heaven’s favorite, but most will think him the object of its
wrath”]).^27 Barclay, here resolutely preserving the clergy even from rhetorical
taint, reworks the latter point, particularly the“plaerique”(“nomen count
them of maners dull and rude”,Prol. 2 : 84 , italics mine). Piccolomini launches
at this point an exordium that announces he will now address the require-
ments and risks to which thefive senses are exposed in the world of the court:
in oratione pro Marco Caelio Ciceronem dicentem inuenimus; quibus in uerbis
omnes quinque sensus tetigit quibus voluptates hauriuntur. (Mustard, 37 )
[wefind Cicero saying this in his speech on behalf of Marcus Caelius; in these
words he has touched on all thefive senses to which our pleasures cling.]
While Barclay follows the general organization suggested by thisdispositio–
he traces in sequence Piccolomini’s treatment of thefive senses–he entirely
omits the prefatory statement that announces it. Piccolomini’s source text
becomes rhetorically and sensorily ordered body, and Barclay’s vernacular
version is located in the movement“from insufficiency to anticipation,”
96 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland