here royal, glory. This afflicted body is also the place where political and
cultural registers cross, since darkness is now, on André’s own showing,
an alibi for a range of interventions and mediations. Caught in a historical
twilight, seemingly compelled to speak ofres gestaswithout reliable inform-
ant, he must have recourse, decorously or not, to matter which is“boldly”
added from his own invention (“audaciae potius quam negligentiae abs
te accusatum iri potevolui”[“I would rather you held me accused of rashness
than of negligence”], 4 ), and to the replacement of a historicalordo naturalis
with his own, quite aggressively artificial one, ironically named here as
fragmentation. The supplementary additional matter, as it happens, is in
fact central, for on the speeches, poems and digressions derived from
classical precedent rests André’s purpose of defining the Tudor present
anew. As he does so, he accrues cultural capital, becoming the vatic bearer
of a new kind oftranslatio, and a new understanding ofimperium. What is
striking is that instead of in any way concealing turbulent dynastic origins
and questionable legitimacy, André’s blindness hides them in plain sight.^17
On a chronological and biographical level, André’s life mirrors that of
his ruler. TheVitasurveys the monarch’s reign and achievements up to
the surrender of the pretender Perkin Warbeck in 1498 , but also uses
this narrative to frame a series of occasional poems in which André cere-
monializes major events. The manuscript thus advertises itself as a work in
progress for a dynastic foundation in process.^18 Large gaps are frequently
left, usually introduced by a claim that André will write more on the topic at
hand once he is better informed. The effect of this“retrospective collec-
tion,”as Carlson calls it, is to maintain a double focus on poet and prince,
on the narrative moment of lineal origin but also on the qualities of the
historiographic and lyricfictions in which it is couched.^19 As a character in
his work André bears a special relationship to what we might call occasional
timing, as each new event of royal politics is accompanied by André’s
appearance within the frame, writing or singing a poem.
But when we look to the dynasty’s founding moment at Bosworth,
André is not all there:
Hoc ego bellum quamvis auribus acceperim, tamen hac in parte certior aure
arbiter est oculus. Diem, igitur, locum, ac belli ordinem, quia ut dixi sum privatus
hac luce oculorum, ne quid temerarie affirmem, supersedeo. Et pro tam bellico
campo, donec plenius instructus fuero, campum quoque latum hoc in albo
relinquo. ( 32 )
[Though I heard of this battle with my ears, yet in this matter the eye is a surer
judge than the ear. I therefore omit the day, the place and the order of battle (since
26 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland