Court Poet Research Articles

Hitomaro: Poet as God (review)

Reviewed by: Hitomaro: Poet as God Roselee Bundy Hitomaro: Poet as God. By Anne Commons. Brill, 2009. xii, 228 pages. Hardcover €93.00/$132.00. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro's stately chōka in Man'yōshū, which mourn the passing of royals and lament his wife's death as well as their partings while she was alive, still move readers with their craft and emotional force. For this handful of poems alone, Hitomaro would be regarded as among the greatest practitioners of the classical Japanese verse tradition. In Hitomaro: Poet as God, however, Anne Commons focuses our attention on what she describes as the poet's "afterlife, the centuries-long process of his reception and canonization as a court poet and as an enshrined deity worshipped for non-poetic purposes" (p. 1). At each stage of her argument, Commons illuminates the manner in which the poet was re-imagined and re-presented according to the needs of different times and circumstances, through the application of "cultural pattern[s] or trope [s] visible in literary or religious discourse at that time" (p. 201). In this ambitious, richly detailed study, the author is attentive to both the literary and religious contexts of Hitomaro's canonization—the two processes reinforcing each other—and traces "the uses [Hitomaro] served as a poetic icon and legitimating symbol of poetry's antiquity and authority, as well as poetry's relationship to larger developments in religious thought" (p. 1). The literary and religious processes of canonization become integrated "in the development of modes of thought in which poets could become deities and poetry itself came to be regarded as sacred" (p. 2). Commons opens her narrative by briefly examining the very few facts known about Hitomaro and his life and goes on to show how Man'yōshū begins to manufacture an image of an already esteemed poet and his life. Here and elsewhere in the Heian portion of her text, Commons focuses on two aspects of Hitomaro's presentation: textual statements about the stature of the poet and how the choice and staging of his poems or those more dubiously attributed to him contribute to the formation of his image. These two aspects are inextricably intertwined, since the choice and staging of his verses reflect the compilers' regard for the poet and become, in subsequent texts, the basis for further elaboration of [End Page 409] his hagiography. Commons points out, for example, how Man'yōshū establishes Hitomaro's connection with Iwami (modern Shimane prefecture) as a sort of foundation stone: She argues convincingly that the arrangement of Hitomaro's well-known Iwami sōmonka (love poems) and banka (elegies) and their accompanying headnotes—those that speak of his parting from his wife in Iwami and the verses that record and lament his passing—"reflect clear editorial intent to construct a narrative of Hitomaro's life and death" (p. 12). Further, citing such scholars as Itō Haku and Hashimoto Tatsu, Commons points to the likelihood that the Iwami verses were fictive performance pieces recited by Hitomaro in his role as poet-performer in the court. In subsequent ages, Iwami is named variously as the site of Hitomaro's birth or his supernatural appearance, his death, and his governorship. Eventually, two shrines in the region were dedicated to him. Man'yōshū includes as well, Commons shows, "the first explicit reference to Hitomaro as a great poet of an earlier age" (36), revealing not only the editors' desire to construct the poet's biography through his verses but the special status accorded many of Hitomaro's other compositions in that work. Two Heian-period royal collections, however, elaborate upon Hitomaro's biography and enhance his stature in new directions, bringing to the fore Hitomaro's "appropriation as a legitimizing figure by parties eager to reinforce their own poetic and political authority" (p. 2). "Probably the single most influential text in the entire history of Hitomaro's reception," Kokinshū, according to Commons, establishes Hitomaro as the "sage of poetry" (p. 39). Its kana preface elaborates on Hitomaro's biography, maintaining that he held the Senior Third Rank. It also declares that he was active in a time when...

Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What Is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity?

Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What Is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity? James Livingston Prelude: The Vanishing Subject I have elsewhere argued that the original American pragmatists revolutionized twentieth-century European philosophy by determining or reshaping the intellectual agendas of Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Émile Durkheim, Georges Sorel, Jean Wahl, and Alexandre Kojève. I have also argued that the “critique of the subject” proposed by poststructuralist feminists—particularly by Judith Butler—becomes more coherent and consequential when we rewrite its Nietzschean genealogy to include its pragmatist antecedents.1 In this space, I want to argue that William James and John Dewey are better guides to the end of modernity than Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who still reign as the court poets of the so-called linguistic turn. I will claim that because the pragmatists do not abstain from the universalization of the commodity form (that is, from “objectification,” reification, exchange value, modern credit, etc.) and do not indulge an idealization of artisanal labor, they are more useful philosophers for our own time—the [End Page 32] time of “globalization”—than Nietzsche or Heidegger and, for that matter, Horkheimer, Adorno, or Habermas.2 I begin by rehearsing the adjournment of modern subjectivity accomplished in James’s essays on radical empiricism. Then I enlist Jose Ortega y Gasset, a close reader of Heidegger, to ask why that accomplishment has not been adequately acknowledged—which is to ask why Heidegger’s version of an end to modernity has kept its accreditation. At this stage of the argument, the critics of pragmatism, who invariably emphasize that metaphors of money, commerce, and credit disfigure the philosophical discourse of James and Dewey, turn state’s evidence and make my case for pragmatism. In concluding, I will suggest that these metaphors, and the nihilistic discourse we call pragmatism, are the linguistic resources we need to escape the “pathos of authenticity” and to address, accordingly, the universalization of the commodity form as both an impediment to and the condition of democracy. In my view it is almost self-evident that pragmatism dwells in, and on, the end of modernity, simply because it gives up the ghost of modern subjectivity—that is, the historically specific compound of assumptions, ideas, and attitudes that convenes each individual as a set of radical discontinuities (e.g., mind versus body) that are in turn projected outward, as language and work, and which meanwhile confers an ontological priority on the individual whose freedom resides in release from identities and obligations determined by the past (that is, by historical time). Almost but not quite self-evident. Sometimes changes are so profound, so complete and effective, that we do not recognize them as events that have already occurred.3 Donald Davidson suggested as much in 1986, in an influential essay entitled “The Myth of the Subjective.” Here he noted that the ideas associated with “the relation between the human mind and the rest of nature, [or] the subjective and the objective as we have come to think of them, . . . are now coming under critical scrutiny, and the result promises to mark a sea change in contemporary philosophical thought—a change so profound that we may not recognize that it is occurring.” The change he had in mind was the “demise of the subjective,” which would derive from the collapse of the ontological division between mind and world, between thought and thing, or, as Davidson once put it, between scheme and content. “What we are about to see,” he claimed, “is the emergence of a radically revised view of the relation of mind and the world.”4 [End Page 33] Until that happened, most philosophers would cling to a Cartesian “myth of the subjective,” which Davidson summarized as follows: “Since we cannot be certain what the world outside the mind is like, the subjective can keep its virtue—its chastity, its certainty for us—only by being protected from contamination of the world.” Myth or not, it had determined the intellectual agenda of modernity: “To a large extent this picture of mind and its place in nature has defined the problems modern philosophy has thought it had to solve.” Or again: “Instead of saying...

Counselling the Prince: Advice and Counsel in Thirteenth-Century Welsh Society

In thirteenth-century Gwynedd, advice and counsel were sought through a variety of means. Whilst some of them, such as consultation of leading magnates and prelates, were common to much of Europe, the princes of Gwynedd still relied on traditional methods of counsel, most notably the advice given by court poets through their works. This article demonstrates how this very public method of advice was employed, the reaction of the princes to it, and its role as part of the machinery of the court. It then considers how the advice of the poets contributed to, and reflected, the move away from confederate consultation with the other princes of Wales to the use of a body of ‘counsellors’ drawn from Gwynedd as the thirteenth century progressed, a style of leadership which brought Gwynedd into line with wider European methods of governance.

Romancing Scandinavia: relocating chivalry and romance in eighteenth‐century Britain

The latter part of the eighteenth century saw a new interest in the medieval romance. This article examines how such interest coincided with the development of a widely accepted (albeit controversial) theory that metrical tales of chivalry originated with the Scandinavian court poets, the scalds. In England, the theory had a nationalistic orientation, since it was proposed that the scalds had formed an integral part of Anglo‐Saxon culture. The article argues that the theory emerged at a critical juncture when attempts to form a new vernacular canon were under way. The theory was specifically useful in breaking with the common conception that Anglophone romances were merely copies or imitations of French examples. The imaginative rewriting of poetic history helped to acquire for English literature a status closer to the center of European literary progress. Central to this new origin narrative of romance was the notion of the Gothic peoples’ ethnic inheritances. It is analyzed how ideas established in mainstream political discourses were tapped and transferred to the construction of “vernacular” literature. The main proponents of the theory were Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, whose somewhat conflicting versions of romance development are discussed and contextualized.

The Vestige Of Court Poetry In Modern Yoruba Music: A Study Of Sikiru Ayinde Barrister

This article examines the retention of some features of traditional court poetry in modern Yoruba music. The article's focus is the juju music even as Sikiru Ayinde Barrister attracts the attention of the article. Efforts are made to establish the similarities between court poets and modern musicians in the performance of the roles of checks and balances, drawing from the memories of the past, both good and bad in order to propel towards a glorious tomorrow. Characteristic of the traditional court poets, modern musicians explore, to the maximum, the unique privilege of remarking on the king/leader and his activities for his good and that of the people he presides over. Therefore, leisure, sought in music, provides education, sensibility, training, construction and reconstruction to ensure: a better living, a wonderful co-existence and, possibly an articulate global community. Keywords: Court poetry, Yoruba music, juju music.Indilinga Vol. 7 (1) 2008: pp. 23-36

Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History (review)

Reviewed by: Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History Roselee Bundy Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History. By Steven D. Carter. Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. 515 pages. Hardcover $55.00/£35.95/€50.70. Across the years, visitors to Kyoto have glanced with curiosity at the Reizei family residence on the southwest corner of Imadegawa and Karasuma, on the same block as the modern structures of Dōshisha University. Once surrounded by the homes of many other members of the Kyoto nobility, the Reizei compound remains a visible sign of the family’s centuries-long dedication to the enterprise of waka. The Reizei family traces its ancestry back to the great court poets of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods—Fujiwara Shunzei (1114–1204) and his son Teika (1162–1241) and grandson Tameie (1198–1275)—the Reizei name having become attached to the descendants of Tameie’s son Tamesuke (1263–1328). Twenty-five generations later, the Reizei family still teaches and practices poetry. In addition, their family library has preserved and accumulated poetic texts, diaries, and paintings dating as far back as the late Heian period. Only in the spring of 1980 were select documents published or exhibited to the public at large. (The Reizei library has few works that were previously unknown. However, it contains manuscripts in the hand of such figures as Shunzei, Teika, and Tameie, as well as later Reizei masters.) Steven D. Carter’s Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History traces the history of this poetic family from the time of Shunzei, disclosing how across the centuries, the Reizei family “parlay[ed] their social and cultural capital—their pedigree, their rank, their stores of knowledge, texts, and artifacts and the status those things conferred—into financial support to sustain it in the practice of the poetic Way” (p. 8). Carter’s is a history “of a house as a house—rather than just of the various individuals who bear its name—and the poetic enterprise to which that house was dedicated” [End Page 408] (p. 8), and his attention to the larger and shifting contexts of waka practice—social, political, economic, interpersonal—vastly expands our understanding of this art form. Indeed, he challenges his readers to rethink their conception of the nature of artistic creativity itself. As Carter further writes, Moderns may find [curious] this fixation on engagement with a long tradition—especially one that is embodied in a kind of conventionality rather than in a properly sanctified lineage of geniuses. . . . [T]o overlook conventionality, in the case of waka, at least, is to refuse to engage the record of the past as an ongoing project that cannot be reduced to the accomplishments of a few canonized “masterpieces” or sanctified “geniuses”—to allow the reputation of a few individuals and texts, in other words, to obscure the contours of a much larger discourse. (p. 364) The story of the Reizei family from the Kamakura period to the present day is fascinating in its details. Interweaving the activities of the Reizei house with major events in Japanese history during this long span of time, Carter’s narrative discloses the family’s remarkable resiliency and political astuteness in the service of preserving its status as purveyors of their centuries-old art form. Among the more familiar figures is Abutsu-ni (d. ca. 1283), the mother of Tameie’s two youngest sons, who traveled to Kamakura to champion the rights of inheritance of her elder son, Tamesuke, to income from estates and to his father’s manuscripts. The suit precipitated the split between the Nijō, the descendants of Tameie’s sons by an earlier wife, and the Reizei (and Kyōgoku) schools. A pattern of cultivating connections with the warrior class continued until the modern age, as the Reizei heirs sought both to adapt to the changing landscape of power and to maintain their at-times contentious association with the imperial court in Kyoto. By the Edo period, the Reizei also faced serious competition from not only new literary genres but commoner poets (jige), who were ready to challenge the authority of the established noble lineages. Yet the prestige of the waka tradition and of...

Time for Marlowe

Time for Marlowe Graham Hammill Christopher Marlowe is a serious political thinker. He read widely in English and continental political thought and was well-versed in tracts on the French civil wars. This reading is reflected throughout his works, from the plots he chooses to the words he uses. How political thought works in his writings, though, is more of a problem. Unlike the court poet and bureaucratic administrator Edmund Spenser, Marlowe gives no pastoral world or fairyland within which he can "[create] well-governed and well-governing subjects," proto-republican citizens formulated through humanist ethics.1 Instead of writing within the norms of civility and governance, Marlowe focuses on crises and states of emergency in order to conceptualize contemporary political thought by suspending or "estranging" its main premises, to use Emily Bartels's felicitous term.2 Marlowe's focus on moments of crisis is fueled by his own political experiences. Writing in London in the late 1580s and early 1590s, when "the government's responses to national security emergencies were by turns lackadaisical, earnest, and intermittently harsh, even despotic," led Marlowe to explore absolutism and its tendency towards militarism.3 Moreover, his employment as an operative for the Elizabethan state—continually exposed to the whimsical decisions of those in power—both nourished his radical intellectual tendencies and made him a perceived security threat to that state during one of these government crackdowns. As Conyers Read and Lawrence Stone showed many years ago, Elizabethan intelligencers were strongly dependent upon the seemingly capricious decisions of their employers. In part, the issue is economic. Members of the Elizabethan administration—often working against one another—recruited individuals from debtors prison and the universities to trade on their futures, promising great rewards for spying. Since none of these administrators had much money to pay intelligencers, however, the tendency was to string the spies along, promising future payment for more information.4 But also the issue has to do with the social form that intelligencing takes. To accumulate information, an intelligencer had to become a Catholic in the company of Catholics, a traitor in the company of traitors, and a [End Page 291] loyal servant in the company of the powerful. This evacuation of identity bound the intelligencer more perniciously to his employer, since the ever-present danger was that an administrator would simply cut off an intelligencer and let him languish in the criminal identity that he had tactically assumed.5 Marlowe's response to this situation is conceptual and aesthetic. He thinks through the contemporary political terms by which the inner workings of political crises can be grasped, and he displays those inner workings in literary form. Playing political concept off of theatrical form, Marlowe bypasses citizenship, the creation of well-governed and well-governing political subjects, and engages a more radical understanding of political life in which the political subject is defined by its exposure to the caprices of state authority. We can see this in Marlowe's use of the word "massacre." A word that enters English in the 1570s, Marlowe uses it an impressive fifteen times, most famously in the title of his last play, The Massacre at Paris—the first use of the word to name an historical event, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.6 William Shakespeare, by contrast, uses the word eight times, and Spenser, six times—both over longer, more copious literary careers.7 In this essay I read Marlowe's use of the word "massacre" alongside emergent early modern absolutist political thought to show how Marlowe reworks contemporary political thought from the underside, as it were. In the late sixteenth century, absolutist political thinkers increasingly focus on the necessity of the sovereign to act outside of the law in order to preserve the stability of the state. Tacitly justifying the 1572 murder of the French Huguenots, these writers generally acknowledge that the sovereign and the sovereign alone has the right to use extralegal violence to resolve crises, actual or potential, that threaten the state. Rather than representing the phenomenon as an historical outrage, as do most Protestant political writers, Marlowe uses the word "massacre" throughout his works as a node of political thought that encapsulates...

François Villon, nouvel Énée? De l’ouverture à la clôture de l’Épître à Marie d'Orléans

L’Épître à Marie d’Orléans has often been deemed unworthy of François Villon’s quill; yet it opened the castel of Blois’ doors for him. The Parisian poet established a dialog with the duke by using the praise of the young princess to stimulate her father to think about the mechanisms and the limits of the laudatio. First, he poses as a contemporary Vergil by keeping to the traditional pattern. Then, in the Double ballade, he proceeds to a self-interested speech in which the barely gained authority is eroded in order to end the Épître in a heroic parody. When Villon calls Marie a “noble Didon,” he identifies to the fugitive Eneas arriving in Carthage. Charles d’Orléans will have appreciated Villon’s slightly self-mocking attitude even more since he is familiar with this method. He will also have appreciated how the poet subtly suggests – behind the veil of praise and erudition – that he is only transient in Blois and that he would definitely not be a good court poet. The Épître can be read in many ways because of the plays of intertextuality and the use of various styles: Indeed, Villon adresses a group of experts.

To Forge a Book in the Medieval Ages: Nezām al-Molk's Siyar al-Moluk (Siyāsat-Nāma)

AbstractStatements by medieval authors notwithstanding, the issue of counterfeiting the texts during the Islamic Medieval Ages has not been seriously discussed by modern researchers. The latter prefer to pass in silence over the possibility that an unauthentic text could be intentionally forged by someone with selfish, ideological, and other purposes. This problem especially concerns the texts written in the genre of medieval advice literature and attributed to the prominent state figures or outstanding Muslim scholars. The article presents conclusive evidence that such is the case of the Siyar al-moluk (Siyāsat-nāma) forged by a Saljuq court poet, Mohammad Mo'ezzi, and ascribed by him to the famous Saljuq vizier Nezām al-Molk.

Book and Text in France, 1400-1600: Poetry on the Page by Adrian Armstrong, Malcolm Quainton

532 Reviews relevant enough for theFrench King Charles V theLearned (I 364-80) to ask Denis Foulechat to translate it.The king was then setting up his famous library and had put his finest translators towork in an unprecedented endeavour which was toweigh on the evolution of theFrench language. Charles Brucker, from theUniversity ofNancy, has enjoyed a forty-yearacquain tancewith John and hismedieval translator,publishing in instalments practically the whole of Denis Foulechat's work (note, by theway, that the English language still lacks itsown complete translation of thePolicraticus). This scholarlyvolume isa richly annotated edition ofmore than nine hundred pages, of Book v only, inwhich John, quoting an apocryphal letter fromPlutarch to theRoman emperor Trajan (entitled InstitutioTraiani inChapter II), elaborates on theorganic metaphor for the state: the prince is thehead, his appointed officials are the eyes andmouth, thecitizenry consti tute the feet,etc., and of course theChurch is the soul.What will make Brucker's work invaluable forhistorians of the French language is that it also provides the original Latin text (and a competent modern French translation of itforgood measure), which allows one to assess the importance of its influence on the target language. Close to 250 informative introductory pages on John's social philosophy and Foulechat's lan guage and translating skills are accompanied by various indexes and a state-of-the-art glossary of over I700 entries (remember, Nancy is the birthplace of the Tresor de la languefranfaise aswell as of theDictionnaire dumoyenfranfais). It is,however, unfor tunate that the publisher could not be persuaded to display the Latin textopposite Foulechat's Middle French version rather than opposite itsmodern translation: this would have led to some rationalizing of the footnotes. A consequence is thatwe are actually given two books in one, one definitely essential to historians of the French language, theother reasonably useful tounderstanding medieval thought. UNIVERSITE MARC BLOCH, STRASBOURG DOMINIQUE PIERRE GERNER Book and Text inFrance, I400-I600: Poetry on thePage. Ed. by ADRIAN ARMSTRONG and MALCOLM QUAINTON. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2007. 236 pp. ?50. ISBN 978 0-7546-5590-9. Several monographs and collections of essays discussing the relationships between authors, texts, contexts, and readers have appeared over the last two decades, and Adrian Armstrong, one of the two editors of thisvolume, has been an important con tributor to this trend. Focusing on the period 1400-i600, which saw the transition frommanuscript culture toprint culture, the essays in this latest volume cover both aspects, but dealing onlywith poetry and concentrating more heavily on works dating from the earlier part of theperiod than on the later sixteenth century. Of the nine essays, only Malcolm Quainton's analysis of the increasing use of parenthesis and lunulae by Ronsard in successive editions of theHynne de Calays et deZethes from 1556 to I584 belongs wholly to the second half of the sixteenth century. Armstrong's essay on woodcut illustration in editions of Jean Bouchet's Amoureux transinotes thateditions were produced up toas late as I599, but deals mainly with the earlier editions. Three essays focus on themid-sixteenth century: Richard Cooper's study of illustration inClement Marot's poetry; Fran,ois Rigolot's study of the socio cultural context ofmid-sixteenth-century Lyon, which, he argues, enabled a female writer frommodest origins to have her poetry published by a distinguished Lyon printer, Jean de Tournes; and Tom Conley's analysis of the relationship between Bernard Salomon's woodcuts for Maurice Sceve's 1547 Saulsaye (again published by de Tournes) and the text itself. The remaining fiveessays relate either to the fifteenth century or to the early sixteenth century. In 'CourtlyGatherings and Poetic Games: MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 533 "Coterie" Anthologies in theLate Middle Ages inFrance' JaneTaylor demonstrates persuasively fromanalysis of a group ofmanuscript verse anthologies associated with Charles d'Orleans and his circle that farfrombeing loosely constructed 'miscellanies', such anthologies were carefully ordered compilations, put togetherby court poets for themselves and their own coteries of fellow poets. JeanMiihlethaler's contribution also relates toCharles d'Orleans, analysing theway inwhich the early Paris publisher Anthoine Verard selected for inclusion inhis edition of theChasse etdepart d'amours only those ballades by Charles d'Orleans which offered an 'exemplary expression of courtly values' (p. 46...

Chaucer and Langland: the antagonistic tradition

Although Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland together dominate fourteenth-century English literature, their respective masterpieces, The Tales and Piers Plowman, could not be more different. While Chaucer's writings suggest that he considered himself an heir, not a begetter, the notion of him as a father-figure standing at the head of a patrilineal literary tradition was formulated within a generation of his death. John Bowers asks how Chaucer, not Langland, was granted this position. His study becomes an examination of the political, social, and religious factors that contributed to the formation of a literary canon in fourteenth-century England.The earliest complete version of Piers Plowman predates Chaucer's text; Langland's poem was immediately influential and widely disseminated; it was read, quoted, copied, and imitated throughout the last decades of the fourteenth century. In contrast, there is very little evidence that Chaucer's works reached any sort of wide readership in his lifetime.Yet it was Chaucer, not Langland, who was elevated as a cultural and literary progenitor early in the century after his death. He was a court poet, and he was fortunate enough to have a series of literary heirs, notably Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, who vigorously promoted him as England's foundational writer. Chaucer was also a kinsman of the new Lancastrian kings, who championed his Canterbury Tales.Langland, on the other hand, despite his contemporary popularity, was a dissenter and social critic. Linked with the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, Langland's poem espoused a brand of religious reform associated with the heretical Lollard movements.Through extensive manuscript evidence, Bowers tracks the reputations of the two writers into the fifteenth century, when studies of fourteenth-century literature became more clearly configured in terms of a double, antagonistic dynamic. Never really separate, the two literary traditions constantly interacted, with the reputation of Chaucer the court poet eclipsing that of Langland the dissenter and critic. By examining the historical and social contexts within which these traditions arose, Bowers helps us to understand how some texts and writers become canonical and how others become marginalized.

A new iconographical addition to Francis I's adoption of the persona of King David and its contemporary literary context

The presence in the Cathedral at Auch of a large carved representation of Francis I as the Biblical King David on the high back panel of one of the choir stalls, turning to face, in the next stall, a carving of Bathsheba of equal proportions, raises intriguing questions, especially as archive documentation on the subject is sparse and requires contemporary literary texts to support it. This article considers how the carving fits into Francis's known iconography, who may have been responsible for commissioning it (Hippolyte d’Este was Cardinal‐Archbishop of Auch at the relevant time, 1552–1554) and how Francis in the persona of David was seen by his court poet, Clément Marot, by his sister Marguerite de Navarre and by Francis himself. In addition the David‐Bathsheba episode invites comparison with Francis's relationship with the Duchesse d’Etampes. Finally the penitential role of the Psalms is seen to be equally important to both kings.

Avatars d'un griffonnage à succès : L'Epitaphe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne de Jean Molinet

<titre>Misadventures of a successfull griffonnage : Jean Molinet’s Epitaphe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne. </titre> The Epitaphe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne, a short poem commemorating Philip the Good of Burgundy, is the most widely transmitted work of Jean Molinet, the offi cial Burgundian court poet and chronicler between 1475 and 1507. Analysis of the Epitaphe’s reception, on the basis of manuscript and printed witnesses, indicates not only how Molinet’s contemporaries read the poem, but also how its versifi cation produces particular effects. Most manuscript witnesses are devoted primarily to recent history, especially Burgundian history, or produced in a Burgundian milieu; in many cases, the Epitaphe has been copied into an already complete volume. These contexts highlight the poem’s documentary and propagandistic value. However, the Epitaphe’s formal features also prove signifi cant: variant layouts indicate that its use of alexandrines, relatively unusual for the period, confuses several scribes.

John Lydgate’s “Fall of Princes”: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts by Nigel Mortimer

REVIEWS templation and ethical action. Thus when readers are faced with the undecidability of the tale—marriage exemplum vs. spiritual exemplum —‘‘no explanation is totally persuasive, no decision sufficiently justified , no response good enough . . . so that responsibility will have about it an air of irresponsibility’’ (p. 135). The problem Mitchell delineates in the Clerk’s Tale might productively be extended to the rest of the book, to enrich that difficult problem of how one gets from text to action. Perhaps Mitchell’s answer, like that of Gregory the Great in his homilies, is that examples work on the mysterious energy of inspiration —an answer that might lend strength and complexity to his argument about the circumstantial nature of exemplary discourse. Gower is the governing presence in Ethics and Exemplary Narrative, even though Chaucer occupies more chapters. The book joins an ongoing critical exploration of contradiction in the Confessio: from systematic accounts in which particular tales resolve into moments of conversion (Olsson) or the conflict between reason and will brings about an integrated identity (Simpson), scholarship has moved toward an emphasis on Gower’s moral contingency (Bullón-Fernández, Watt, myself). Mitchell lays out a useful basis for this emphasis in philosophy and rhetoric , lends credibility to the medieval method of reducing stories to their moral nuggets, and makes a welcome contribution to the developing conversation about narrative and ethics in the Middle Ages. Elizabeth Allen University of California, Irvine Nigel Mortimer. John Lydgate’s ‘‘Fall of Princes’’: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. vx, 360. $110.00. A recent spate of critical productivity has placed Lydgate at the forefront of Middle English literary criticism and history, a position he has not occupied for almost six centuries, since his days as ‘‘Laureate Lydgate ’’ (Derek Pearsall’s memorable label), when he wrote poetry for kings, princes, abbots, lords, and ladies. In part this flowering of interest reflects a recalibrated understanding of the relationship between medieval and Renaissance literary cultures, with Lydgate now recognized not PAGE 531 531 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:42 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER only as a crucial link between Chaucer and Shakespeare but also as an important influence in his own right on sixteenth-century poetry and drama. Nigel Mortimer’s reassessment of the Fall of Princes adroitly places Lydgate in both his medieval and early modern contexts; it is a study that will be inestimably valuable, not only for medievalists but also for those Renaissance literary critics who take seriously the influence and persistence of medieval traditions in the early modern period. After an introductory survey of the state of play in Lydgate studies and a summary of Lydgate’s career, Mortimer turns to the major source texts for the Fall of Princes, Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and Laurent de Premierfait’s Des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes. In so doing, he sets in place a principle for reading the Fall to which he will adhere throughout the book: Lydgate’s text cannot be understood without a very precise knowledge of its sources, particularly Laurent’s Des Cas. We see this intertexual method begin to pay off in chapter 3, which addresses Lydgate’s position as a Lancastrian court poet and focuses on a varied assortment of texts, ranging from the Serpent of Division to Lydgate’s treatment of Lucretia to the role of Caesar more generally in the Fall of Princes. But it is in chapter 4 that Mortimer’s intertextual work and his concern for historical context come together and illuminate the Fall of Princes in an entirely new way. As he tells us, Lydgate was particularly concerned in the Fall to address the relationships between spiritual and secular authority, so much so that he altered his sources a good deal in order to emphasize the importance of Church hegemony over secular rule. Throughout the chapter, Mortimer builds a convincing case for this claim by painstakingly comparing Lydgate’s exemplars to his sources and showing minutely how those source texts were altered and reshaped in order to make the Benedictine case. Taken alone, these examples would be...

Crossing enemy boundaries: al-Buhturī's ode on the ruins of Ctesiphon re-read in the light of Virgil and Wilfred Owen

This article seeks to gain a better understanding of a famous ode by the ‘Abbāsid court poet al-Buhturī (d. 897) by comparing it with two other works which exhibit a similar thematic development. One is an extract from The Aeneid by Virgil (d. 19 BC), the other a poem by Wilfred Owen (d. 1918). The three texts emanate from imperial identities (Roman, Arab and British) in a state of crisis, which in turn paves the way for cathartic encounters with an alien other that each involves an act of recognition. The comparison uncovers certain similarities in the psychological impact of this encounter and thereby throws a new light on the carefully crafted structure of al-Buhturī's ode. The experience described by the three texts emerges as an expression of man's universal quest for his lost self, and its recovery—however momentarily—in the very heart of his supposed foe.

Maria Szuppe. « Circulation des lettrés et cercles littéraires entre Asie centrale, Iran et Inde du nord (XVe-XVIIIe siècle) ». Annales (Histoire, Sciences Sociales), 59/5-6 (sept.-déc. 2004), pp. 997-1018.

This article examines the production and transmission of literary culture in the post-Timurid, eastern Islamic world, with specific references to the Safavid, Uzbek, and Mughal empires. Szuppe examines this phenomenon through the specific lens of biographical literature (tazkira) of court poets who traveled extensively through these regions. Theoretically, this article supplements recent work by scholars like Robert McChesney which de-emphasize the demarcation of the eastern Islamic world alo...

Dyspepsia* as Dystopia? F. T. Marinetti’s Le Roi Bombance

La Grande Dypepsie eclatera tout a coup, coincidant avec le refroidissement de la terre sterile! (Quatrieme acte, p. 230) You have stripped off the old self ... and have clothed yourself with the new self (Colossians 3: 9-10) It seems fair to say that even out of F. T. Marinetti's French, pre-futurist and thus already less popular literary production, his tragedie satirique (or, tragedie hilare) Le Roi Bombance (LRB), (1) published by the editions of Mercure de France in 1905 and subsequently staged in 1909 at Paris' Theatre de l'Oeuvre, stands out as a text still very much at the margins of both editorial and critical attention. Two simple considerations immediately confirm that Marinetti's theatrical piece has generally (and, given its 'un-theatricality,' one could perhaps add 'understandably') failed to find its audience in both the publishing and scholarly fields. (2) As of today, the only available editions of the text are either the rare original 1905 French, or the even more elusive 1909 (and 1920) Italian translation. (3) The second consideration is that--if I did my homework properly--only three or four full-length scholarly articles have dealt with Le Roi Bombance in recent times. (4) Although from different methodological perspectives, all of these essays invariably discuss Marinetti's work by observing its satirical, socio-political message delivered through the culinary allegory and by underlining in particular the intertextual relationship it establishes with one of Alfred Jarry's most popular texts, Ubu roi (1896). A synthetic glance at the plot of Le Roi Bombance may immediately illuminate both the pervasiveness of such an allegory and, in general terms, the nature of the frequent comparison with Jarry's text: The cook (Ripaille) of the imaginary kingdom of Bourdes, who was able to prepare delicious food for his king, has died and his death has initiated a political crisis. The people protest, and the three royal cooks, in order to calm the situation down, promise to organize a banquet. However, their real goal is just to barricade themselves into the royal kitchens and stuff themselves with food. The 'starving' crowd discovers that it has been fooled and, increasingly mad, eats the king (Roi Bombance), his cooks, his servants and also the court poet (L'Idiot), the one who, telling his stories, had vainly attempted to direct the appetites of the people towards more idealistic objectives. In the end, the characters of Sainte Pourriture (Saint Putrefaction) the eternal force of transformation, accompanied by the vampire Ptiokaroum, resuscitates the characters, who are then 'vomited out' by the same people who had previously ingurgitated them. (see also Eruli 1970, 261) Antipodal observations may easily arise after reading this play. On the one hand, it is hard to deny that we are dealing with an almost illegible (and almost 'un-stageable') text, characterized by 'lunghissime tirate, linguaggio enfatico e molto tradizionale, azioni macchinose' (Eruli 1992, 152), which rightly deserves to have slipped into oblivion. On the other, however, one also has the impression that the wealth of implications simultaneously elicited and hidden in its verbal and visual 'overflow' may have not yet been explored in its totality. The fairy-like quality of the play and its suggestive force, for example, does not seem to have been stressed enough by scholars. The plot, after all, also tells the story of how one of the 'king's two bodies' (the royal/historical one) is degraded into the other (the natural/pathetic one) until it overlaps with the 'classic,' fairy-like figure of an 'ogre' (Bombance is described as having a 'vaste nez bourgeonnant [ ... ] une houppe de cheveux blonds enfarines [ ... ] la bedaine qui surplombe les cuisses' etc., p. 1). (5) Such a visual coincidence may well anticipate and make evident in a deceivingly elementary fashion--as the 'curtain rises'--not only that 'eating and incorporation' shall be the true protagonists of the piece and that, consequently, the borders of human subjectivity are potentially at stake, but also that the problematic relationship between the 'corporeal' and the 'temporal' (or, in other words, the 'body' and 'history') not to mention the one between the 'beast' and the 'god,' already constitute central preoccupations for Marinetti (and the dynamics between Mafarka and Gazurmah in Mafarka le futuriste (1909) could arguably be a soon to be example of the latter). …

The Image of King `Amr Ibn Hind in the Pre-Islamic Period

The king Amr Ibn Hind ruled the state of Manathira about 8ne and half decade. The poets had had a strong relationship with him. They were his drinking companions. They used to betake his court to obtain his grants or to ask him for the requirements of their own tribes. The king used to care for them. This study is aiming at throwing some light on the image of the king Amr b. Hind as reflected in the poems of his court poets. Hence, to clear out this image, three subjects of these poems will be tackled which are: eulogy, defamatory, threat and inflammatory. In conclusion the image of the king was very clear in the poems of the poets, but differs widely from one subject of the poems to another. He is noble lord in the panigrical poems. In defamatory poems, he is faithless and perfidious. In the threat and inflammatory poems, he is terrible and dreadful.

New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry by Robert G. Benson, Susan J. Ridyard

MLR, IOI .2, 2oo6 5 I3 of ordinary women rather than virgin martyrs provides a significant correlative to the admittedly misogynistic tone which also occurs in the SEL. Thompson fruitfully applies to the SEL much up-to-date and wide-ranging re search in historical and literary scholarship. It is to be hoped that this study of the literary and social contexts of the SEL will be a significant prelude tomore extensive study of the work as awhole and inmore of its parts. The SEL offers farmore than an intriguing codicological detective story. UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ROSAMUND ALLEN New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry. Ed. by ROBERTG. BENSON and SUSAN J.RIDYARD, with an introduction by DEREK BREWER. (Chaucer Studies) Cambridge: Brewer. 2003. Vii+200pp. ?30;$50. ISBN0-85991-778-9. Selected from papers delivered at theApril 2000 Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, the essays in this collection present a stimulating range of perspectives on Chaucer's work. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry offers a diversity of critical approaches, and invites us to encounter and consider multiple Geoffrey Chaucers. Indeed, investigations of Chaucerian multiplicity, ambivalence, and contradiction pervade the collection and draw together these wide-ranging and engaging studies. The two opening papers by Helen Cooper, 'Chaucerian Representation' (pp. 7 30) and 'Chaucerian Poetics' (pp. 3 I-50), foreground such issues of multiplicity. Cooper explores the different-and often contradictory-versions of Chaucer we encounter both in his own work and in later representations and appropriations. Her search for Chaucer via reception history takes in the 'classic' author of I532 onwards, the Protestant Chaucer, bawdy Chaucer, and the endless bifurcations and contentions of more recent criticism: Robertsonian Chaucer versus Lollard Chaucer, protofeminist versus misogynist. Chaucer's own versions of himself present similar contradictions: the ridiculed narrator of Sir Thopas alongside the brilliant parodist; the humble, unassuming 'Geffrey' versus the self-claimed stature of an 'Englyssh Gaufride', which Cooper argues is a naming of himself (p. 49). Rather than holding up amirror to nature, Cooper suggests that Chaucer presents 'ahall of mirrors: we see endless refractions that do nothing so much as reflect other Chaucers or other books' (p. 24) and our own changing ideologies and concerns. Other essays explore different aspects of Chaucerian multiplicity and contradiction. For example, R. Barton Palmer's paper on the Legend of Good Women (pp. I83 94) considers the tensions and frustrations of working as a court poet. The poem's 'harassed and troubled' narrative persona (p. I94) refracts back upon the challenges facing Chaucer himself as a poet responding to the desires and commands of patrons, and negotiating the attitudes and agendas of the texts and traditions he translates. In his essay on 'Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde' (pp. I65-82) John Hill presents us with a very different Pandarus from that of usual criticism, of fering an apologia for the male friend and the Ciceronian ideology of friendship in the poem. Traugott Lawler explores the Boethian philosophy underlying Chaucer's evaluation of 'delit', and the associated Golden Age ideals of contented labour and simplicity rather than luxury or Edenic indolence ('Delicacy vs. Truth: Defining Moral Heroism in the Canterbury Tales', pp. 75-90). In 'Thinking about Money in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale' (pp. I I9-38), William E. Rogers and Paul Dower reflect upon the problematic nature of money in the tale, arguing that we are projecting our own postmodern concerns upon the text in a process which is 'not anachronism, but hermeneutics' (p. I38). The authors suggest that 'Chaucer connects with us most profoundly, not in those places where we think we understand him completely, but in those places where we are most aware that we do not' (p. I38). 514 Reviews These problematic places are a fruitful focus throughout the collection. Yet some essays dare to glance away from Chaucerian ambivalence and multiplicity to the par ticular challenges of 'straightforward Chaucer'. In his essay on 'Chaucer's Endings' (pp. 9I-IO6), William Provost looks briefly at 'AnABC'-not regarded by modern readers as 'especially inspired, or possessed of the Chaucerian qualities of wit or irony that mark his better known work' (p. 93). Helen Cooper considers the difficulty of Anelida...

Printing Power: Selling Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer

Chapter 5:Printing Power: Selling Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer Andrew Higl Early modern editors dubbed Chaucer the premier author in the English tradition, a master of love verse, and a proto-reformist. Caroline Spurgeon's magisterial three volume overview of Chaucerian criticism and allusions traces the appropriation of Chaucer to fit the above mentioned roles. One laudation describes Chaucer as "a sharpe Logician, a sweete Rhetorician, a pure Poett, a graue Philosopher, and a sacred Theologian, He surpassed the Mathemattickes in his time in ther art or cemeinge."1 However, Chaucer is not alone in these early modern references. Lydgate and Gower stand by his side forming a hackneyed triumvirate often cited as the great fathers of English. In texts dated between 1500 and 1600, Spurgeon includes 14 instances where Lydgate and Chaucer are mentioned together, 16 where Gower and Chaucer are mentioned together, and 18 where Lydgate, Chaucer, and Gower are mentioned together.2 Some praise Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer equally. Others, especially later examples, set Chaucer above the others as the "Prince" or "God" of English poetry. Henry IV had already initiated Chaucer's canonization in the fifteenth century when he installed a dead Chaucer as the court poet. This move was nationalistic, but, perhaps because Chaucer had already proved useful after death, his prolific place in early modern England seems to point to his economic viability in light of his religious and nationalistic functionality. Chaucer is easily appropriated, and the early moderns do not initiate anything new, but the advent of print and increase in literacy magnify the comodification of Chaucer that had been initiated in the wake of his death.3 Not only does Chaucer become a marketable commodity, but his name and oeuvre establishes an English vernacular tradition necessary for the sale of the English language and, subsequently, literature written in the English language. If Chaucer is such a viable commodity, then why are Gower or Lydgate not? Defenders of Chaucer's prominence and the others' obscurity describe Lydgate [End Page 57] and Gower as simply too uninteresting and have dismissed their rhetorical connection with Chaucer when tracing the English literary tradition in early modern commentaries. H. S. Bennett dismisses Lydgate and chalks up his early popularity in print to the lack of discretion on the part of early modern readers: The fact is that [printers'] potential clients were not able to discern clearly the superiority of Chaucer over all other English poets, so that it was the works of Lydgate, not Chaucer, to be found freely on book stalls. While (fortunately) there was no collected edition of Lydgate's 145,000 lines of verse, no less than fifteen works of his were put into print , many of them in three or four editions.4 However, I would argue, matters of taste today can hardly explain the forces at work during the sixteenth century. Rather than some tremendous objective quality within Chaucer's work, his personal character, or the precedent set by Henry IV, I suggest that it is the malleability of Chaucer's work and the precedent of fifteenth-century continuations of the Chaucerian texts that marked Chaucer's work as open and flexible. Many will suggest that the openness of medieval literature is the rule rather than the exception. Texts in vernacular and Latin traditions were frequently continued and changed in the Middle Ages. However, the medieval notion of authorship locates authority in classical writers such as Virgil and Ovid and not those who made additions and changes. Chaucer, according to the textual evidence which links him to the classical past and his visual prominence on title pages, takes on a role analogous to the classical auctor. However, his Englishness and structure of his canon make his work the subject of change and continuation in the early years of print in England. We can trace Chaucer's flexibility in fifteenth century manuscripts and also in early modern printed editions. After Seth Lerer's foundational study of early Chaucerian readership, there have been a number of important explorations of Chaucer's reception in the years after Chaucer's death.5 However, little critical attention has been paid to the role of the other members...