temporarily at least, it clothes the poet in habits of such pomp that no one
inquires about the person beneath them. A costume of language is made out of
the fabric of a protocol woven from ancient, exhausted feudal traditions...
Although prisoners of courts where they were, for better or worse, dependents,
these men had one place in which they could hide from this alienation–the
inside of the poetic universe, i.e., the act of constituting the text.”See“The
Great Game of Rhetoric,”trans. Annette and Edward Tomarken,New Literary
History 12 ( 1981 ), 493 – 508 ( 495 , 507 ). For the original, seeLe Masque et la
lumière: la poétique des grands rhétoriqueurs(Paris, 1978 ), 48 – 49 , 54.
77 .See“The Manciple’s Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in theCanterbury
Tales,”ELH 82 ( 1985 ), 85 – 118 ( 91 ). As Fradenburg points out, the ambiguity is
nicely caught in Lydgate’s admonition that“prayer of princes is a commaunde-
ment. See“Isopes Fabules,”The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble
MacCracken, 2 vols., EETS ES 107 ,OS 192 (London, 1911 , 1934 ), 2 ( 813 ).
78. Louise O. Fradenburg,“Spectacular Fictions: The Body Politic in Chaucer
and Dunbar,”Poetics Today 5 ( 1984 ), 493 – 517 ( 516 ). The phrase“the exigencies
of the political”is cited from Zumthor,“Great Game of Rhetoric”( 496 ). The
original has“le politique”:Le Masque et la lumière, 52. Zumthor’s book along
with Poirion’s (see notes 64 and 75 , above) remain important resources; see also
Alexandre Leupin,“The Powerlessness of Writing: Guillaume de Machaut, the
Gorgon andOrdenance,”Yale French Studies 70 ( 1986 ), 127 – 49.
79. Lacan,“Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,”Ecrits, 82 – 101 ( 92 – 93 ).
80. Fifteenth-Century English Translations of Alain Chartier’s “Le Traité de
l’espérance”and“Le Quadrilogue invectif,”ed. Margaret S. Blayney, 2 vols.,
EETS OS 270 , 281 (Oxford, 1974 , 1980 ),i, 38. For the original, see Alain
Chartier,Le Livre de l’espérance, ed. François Rouy (Paris, 1989 ), 45.
81. Ranald Nicholson,Scotland: The Later Middle Ages(Edinburgh, 1974 ), 575.
82. Leslie J. Macfarlane,William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland: The
Struggle for Order(Aberdeen, 1985 ), 235 , whose discussion the remainder of this
paragraph follows.
83. Ibid.
84. Elton,“Tudor Government”; David Starkey,“Intimacy and Innovation: The
Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485 – 1547 ,”The English Court: From the Wars of the
Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey et al. (London, 1987 ), 71 – 118. Recent
work has pointed to the absolutist proclivities even of the earlier Tudors: T. F.
Mayer,“Tournai and Tyranny: Imperial Kingship and Critical Humanism,”
Historical Journal 34 ( 1991 ), 257 – 77. Mayer argues that Henry VIII’s maneu-
verings over the occupation of Tournai between 1513 and 1519 were in fact
proto-absolutist, and refers this in part to“Henry’s taste for French models”of
sovereignty. Mayer suggests that he was“following the example of his own
father, who probably drew heavily on his Breton experience in shaping his‘new
monarchy’”( 269 ). On Henry VII’s time in Brittany, see Anthony Goodman,
“Henry VII and Christian Renewal,”Studies in Church History 17 ( 1981 ), 115 –
25 , who speaks of Henry VII’s“admiration for the French‘royal religion’”
( 121 ). For opposing viewpoints in the debate as to whether Henry VII’s
Notes to Pages 16 – 17 183