41 .Boethius: De consolatione philosophiae: Translated by John Walton, ed. Mark
Science, EETS OS 170 (London, 1927 ). All references are given by stanza
number, following the editor’s practice.
42. Ian R. Johnson notes that Waltonfinds a“violence”in his subordination to a
female patron and her“unnatural”demand for philosophy:The Idea of the
Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280 – 1520 ,ed.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans
(University Park, 1999 ), 37 n. 4. On Walton and Chaucer, see Johnson,
“Walton’s Sapient Orpheus,” The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the
Vernacular Translations of“De consolatione philosophiae”, ed. A. J. Minnis
(Cambridge, 1987 ), 139 – 68.
43. John Lydgate and Benet Burgh,Secrees of Olde Philisoffres, ed. R. Steele, EETS
ES 66 (London, 1894 ). All references are to this edition. Pearsall comments that
“Here, we are led to believe, the pen slipped limply from [Lydgate’s]fingers,
and the aged monk slumped to thefloor”:John Lydgate(London, 1970 ), 297.
44. Burgh, with a wit not usually allowed him, conflates the attendant dwarf of
romance with Bernard of Chartres’s well-known remark that medieval authors
were dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants, the classical ancients: cited in
John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaevalisxcviii,iii. 4 (Turnhout, 1991 ). On this trope, see
Jacqueline T. Miller,Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and
Renaissance Contexts(Oxford, 1986 ), 9 – 15.
45. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
D. Nicholson-Smith (London, 1988 ), 205.
46. See Green,Poets and Princepleasers, 203 – 05. On Renaissanceimitatioand some
of its major precursors, see Thomas M. Greene,The Light in Troy: Imitation
and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry(New Haven, 1982 ).
47. Thus in theTroy Book, Lydgate claims to“obeie with-oute variaunce”the
command of Henry Prince of Wales,“Whiche hath desire, sothly for to seyn, /
Of verray knyʒthod to remembre ageyn / The worthynes.”This obedient
vessel of his lord’s desire and memory is literally self-effacing, both before his
Lancastrian lord (“I wante connyng his hiʒe renoun tendite”) and Chaucer,
whose authority enables Lydgate’s text. See Lydgate’sTroy Book, ed. Henry
Bergen, 4 vols., EETS ES 97 , 103 , 106 , 126 (London, 1906 – 35 ),i, 75 – 77 , 92 ,
3527 – 30.
48. All quotations from Chaucer’s work are fromThe Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry
D. Benson et al., 3 rd edn. (Boston, 1987 ). Quotations from theCanterbury
Tales (CantT)are by group and line number.
49. John Cooper Mendenhall,Aureate Terms: A Study in the Literary Diction of the
Fifteenth Century(Lancaster, 1919 ), 61 – 67.
50 .“Even when they...are oriented towards non-material stakes that are not
easily quantified, as in‘pre-capitalist’societies or in the cultural sphere of
capitalist societies, practices never cease to comply with an economic logic”:
Pierre Bourdieu,The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA,
1990 ), 122.
Notes to Pages 8 – 10 179