Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

34. Hult,Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, 124.


35. R. Howard Bloch,“Silence and Holes: TheRoman de Silenceand the Art of the
    Trouvère,”Yale French Studies 70 ( 1986 ), 81 – 99 ( 95 ).


36. On the fetish as compensation that ameliorates fear of castration, see Freud,
    Standard Edition,xxi, 147 – 57 ( 152 – 53 ).


37. Paul D. Psilos,“‘Dulle’Drede and the Limits of Prudential Knowledge in
    Skelton’sBowge of Court,”Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 ( 1976 ),
    297 – 317 ( 312 ).


38. “Youre key is mete for every lok, / Youre key is commen and hangyth owte; /
    Youre key is redy, we nede not knok / Nor stand long wrestyng ther aboute”
    ( 22 – 25 ): see John Skelton,Poems, ed. Robert S. Kinsman (Oxford, 1969 ), 137 ,
    note to lines 22 ff. The dreamer’s state as he falls asleep in a named location
    recalls the“thoghty”Hoccleve at the beginning of theRegement of Princes.
    Dickey notes that the inn’s name“is perfectly apt for the poem’s allegory on all
    its levels, mercantile, courtly and metapoetic”( 240 note 9 ).


39. Cf. Spearing,Medieval to Renaissance, 265.


40. Leigh Winser,“The Bowge of Courte: Drama Doubling as Dream,”English
    Literary Renaissance 6 ( 1976 ), 3 – 39 , suggests thatThe Bowge“was conceived as a
    dramatic entertainment intended for performance”( 3 ). Whilst this argument
    is open to question, Skelton certainly evokes the visual trappings of early
    Tudor courtly entertainment in his meditation on subjection, symbolism
    and power. Klaus Uhlig,Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters und der
    Renaissance: Studien zu einem Gemeinplatz der europäischen Moralistik
    (Berlin, 1973 ), refers directly to Dame Sans-Pere as“die Personifikation der
    königlichen Majestät”( 287 ).


41. Sarah Kay,Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the
    Twelfth Century(Stanford, 2001 ), 153.


42. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959 – 1960 ,
    ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London, 1992 ), 69 : “the
    distance between the subject anddas Ding...is precisely the condition of
    speech.”All references toThe Ethics of Psychoanalysisare to this edition.


43. It is hardly surprising that some critics, avoiding the temptations of the poem’s
    courtlytopoi, have suggested thatThe Bowgemight owe a debt to nominalism.
    See J. Stephen Russell,“Skelton’sBouge of Court: A Nominalist Allegory,”
    Renaissance Papers 2 ( 1980 ), 1 – 14 ; Helen Cooney,“Skelton’sBowge of Courtand
    the Crisis of Allegory in Late-Medieval England,”Nation, Court and Culture:
    New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin,
    2001 ), 153 – 67.
    44 .MED, s.v. bouche,n. 1 ( 1 ); see also Skelton,Poems,ed. Kinsman, 138.
    45 .L’Abuzé en court, 115 , line 7.


44. I owe this suggestive analogy to Ben Jones.


45. Geoffrey de Vinsauf,Poetria Nova, 28 – 29 , lines 266 – 67 , 270 – 71.


46. Itself a trope associated with the disciplining of rhetoric; in Lucian’s
    Lexiphanes, Lycinus and a doctor called Sopolis administer a violent emetic
    to the eponymous hero to purge his vocabulary ofrecherchéwords and phrases,

192 Notes to Pages 50 – 54