Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland
Allegories of Authority

Explores English and Scottish court poetry written in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Antony J. Hasler (Author)

9781107686564, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 March 2014

268 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

"This is a careful study that attempts to set the literary construction of late medieval Scottish and English court poetry in the context of European humanism."
--Parergon - Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary theory [DSA]