Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland Allegories of Authority Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature Series

This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.

Introduction; Part I. Beginnings: 1. Dunbar's aureate allegories and André's Vita Henrici Septimi; 2. The Bowge of Courte and the birth of the paranoid subject; 3. 'My panefull purs so priclis me': the rhetoric of the self in Dunbar's petitionary poems; Part II. Translative Senses: 4. Alexander Barclay's eclogues and Gavin Douglas's Palice of Honour; 5. Mémoires d'outre-tombe: love, rhetoric and Stephen Hawes; 6. Mapping Skelton: 'Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet'; 7. Conclusion.

Antony J. Hasler is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Saint Louis University.