Cf. Paul de Man’s distinction between symbol, which“postulates the possi-
bility of an identity or identification,”and allegory, which“designates primar-
ily a distance in relation to its own origin”:“The Rhetoric of Temporality,”
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2 nd edn.,
Theory and History of Literature 7 (Minneapolis, 1983 ), 187 – 228 ( 207 ).
Such“fables of patronage”have already proved a significant resource: see Seth
Lerer,Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England
(Princeton, 1993 ), 61.
Michel Foucault,The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York, 1978 ), 148.
Timothy J. Reiss makes the comparable suggestion that Montaigne reads the
private subject of absolutism as by definition“inconstant and constantly
mutable,”a“motion”or“passage,”and implies that the political subject
only“receives its being from its relationship to a sovereignty incarnate in the
person of the prince”:“Montaigne and the Subject of Polity,”inLiterary
Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore,
1986 ), 115 – 49 ( 140 , 137 , 139 – 40 ). The essay appears, significantly revised, in
Reiss’sMirages of the Self: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern
Europe(Stanford, 2003 ), 440 – 68.
On the“mobile, elastic and volatile”qualities of identifications, see Diana
Fuss’s indispensableIdentification Papers(New York, 1995 ), 8.
A. C. Spearing,Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry(Cambridge, 1985 ),
59 – 120 (esp. 105 – 10 ).
David Lawton,“Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,”ELH 54 ( 1987 ), 761 – 99.
On Hoccleve, see Ethan Knapp,The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and
the Literature of Late Medieval England(University Park, PA, 2001 ). On
Lydgate, see most recently the essays inJohn Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and
Lancastrian England, ed. James Simpson and Larry Scanlon (Notre Dame,
2006 ) and Nigel Mortimer,John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in
its Literary and Political Contexts(Oxford, 2005 ).
This has been contended by Lee Patterson: see“Making Identities in Fifteenth-
Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,”New Historical Literary Study:
Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry
J. Reynolds (Princeton, 1993 ), 69 – 107 ,and“‘What is Me?’: Self and Society in the
Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve,”Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 ( 2001 ), 437 – 70.
Pattersonfinds similar tendencies at work in the Ricardian court, where they are
seen as constitutive of the“literary”itself:“Court Politics and the Invention of
Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe,”Culture and History, 1350 – 1600 :
Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit,
1992 ), 7 – 42. See too Scott-Morgan Straker,“Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate’s
Troy Book,”New Medieval Literatures 3 ( 1999 ), 119 – 47 ; Sarah Tolmie,“ThePrive
Scilenceof Thomas Hoccleve,”SAC 22 ( 2000 ), 281 – 309 ; Nicholas Perkins,
Hoccleve’s“Regiment of Princes”: Counsel and Constraint(Cambridge, 2001 ).
For alternative views, see Derek Pearsall,“Hoccleve’sRegement of Princes:The
Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,”Speculum 69 ( 1994 ), 386 – 410 ; Larry Scanlon,
