Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the Court in the Late Middle Ages by Richard Firth Green

Abstract

sion: a rejection of passion for a higher, spiritual love. And if Wood is right about Troilus, both establish a connection between the individual’s subver­ sion of reason by misdirected desire and the political ills of an entire society. Vox Clamantis serves Wood well, but not nearly as well as the Confessio might have done had he been a less cautious scholar. But the author warned the reader that the study is “introductory,” so he should not be seriously faulted for what he has not done. What he has done with considerable success is to reveal Chaucer’s skilful and coherent manage­ ment of the poem’s elements, suggesting at the same time a number of new critical directions which can profitably be pursued. donald f . chapin / University of Western Ontario Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). ix, 253. $20.00 Prolific of texts, barren of genius, the fifteenth century seems to promise little to those whose interests in poetry extend beyond the archival. But the fifteenth century led toward the sixteenth century as well as away from the fourteenth, and Poets and Princepleasers has much to offer those who are in any way interested in the progress of English literature after Chaucer. The English literary renaissance was not simply transplanted from Italy, and it has become increasingly clear in recent years that many of the more puzzling questions about the genesis of Elizabethan attitudes toward poetry will only be answered when we have a better understanding of late medieval attitudes. Such sixteenth-century studies as H. A. Mason’s Humanism and Poetry in the early Tudor Period and John Stevens’s Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court have suggested the need for a better understanding of the courtly context of late medieval literature — the suggestion is implicit, for example, in Mason’s provocative assertion that the study of Wyatt’s court lyrics belongs to sociology rather than to literature — but the textual focus of these studies precludes any detailed exploration of the ways in which the court served to promote and define literary activity. Poets and Prince­ pleasers, by reversing the direction of approach and starting not with the literary texts but with the structures and concerns of court society itself, provides a valuable complement to existing critical studies. The first half of the work is an impressive exercise in historical recon­ struction. Green’s concern here is “to convey some idea of the kind of house­ hold in and for which the late medieval poet worked” (100). To do this he 491 draws on a wide range of materials — court literature, chamber accounts, household ordinances, library inventories, records of seigneurial establish­ ments, chronicles, middle-class correspondence, and, where the English records leave parts of the canvas unfilled, the (probably) analogous prac­ tices of the French and Burgundian courts. What emerges from his account of the royal household — the familia regis, and its inner circle, the camera regis — is a portrait of a disciplined and at the same time highly competi­ tive society, one that was large enough to provide considerable variety of occupation and opportunity — by the 1470s the familia of Edward IV numbered about 600 — and one that was for most of its members virtually self-enclosed, a “complete environment” demanding an almost total commit­ ment. One’s place in the familia was determined largely by service and patron­ age — the twin realities underlying the conventional formulae of the “modesty topos” — and literacy was an important qualification, not only for the increasing number of laymen meeting the court’s clerical needs, but also for those who aspired to admission to the camera regis. The camera, com­ prising those who had daily contact with the king, was the cultural centre of the familia. For its members the writing of poetry was a fashionable though not an important activity, and it was often the recipient of literary (and other) work written either as a commission or for presentation. Letters, however, were more than matter for entertainment. By the late fourteenth century instruction in both “nouriture” and “lettrure” — the latter extending to...