originals”points to others whose desires, imputed or illegible, may not map
securely on to the poet’s desire.
I have tried to sketch some aspects of afifteenth-century writing inherited
by the authors I describe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and these
will be explored in the chapters that follow. Three significant conditions
remain to be outlined. First, while specifics and antecedents have been
endlessly debated, there has been little serious challenge to the view that the
period was marked, in both Scotland and England, by the increasingly
elaborated political strategies of an incipient centralized power. More than
one historian has seen in James IV’s reign a steadily increasing movement
towards absolutism,^81 on the part of a king“bent ...on the political
hegemony of the kingdom.”^82 This drive to hegemony was manifested in
the“pacification”of the Highlands and the imposition of effective control
on the lordship of the Isles and the powerful earldoms of Ross and Mar. The
king’s marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503 “had for the moment quelled the
restless Anglophobia of some of his border magnates,”while the range of his
control was also extending to the Scottish church.^83 This expansion and
elaboration of royal sway was–as has frequently been noted–reflected in a
court culture that accentuated in ways unprecedented in Scotland the
projection of royal magnificence. The early Tudor polity, of course, has
also been associated by historians with an increasing concentration of power
and patronage,^84 though opinion has varied as to how innovative the new
dynasty in fact was, or how far Henry VIII’s assumption of the Royal
Supremacy in 1534 was the outcome of a long-term program.^85 The chapters
below will consider several aspects of this phenomenon, in particular the
changing linguistic politics of Henry VII’s reign and the emergence of the
Privy Chamber.
Secondly, the new conditions of power inform a context in which the
genealogies of English vernacular poetry are not disrupted so much as
consolidated at an unprecedented rate. A strong case has been made by
William Kuskin that the culture of print is integral to this process. In
Kuskin’s account, print reinforces, in a mode internal to culture, the links
between literary production and social authority.^86 Such recent work may
usefully be read against Harry Berger Jnr.’s earlier meditation on the
intersections between the order of the text and the order of the body. For
Berger, the forms of medieval graphic culture“give back to its readers an
image of themselves transformed by chirographic artifice.”^87 Berger notes
the means by which writing“progressively abstracts the means of produc-
tion from the control of the body and thus alienates the production of
meaning,”^88 a tendency which is built into scribal culture and which reaches
Introduction 17