Power and Imagination. City-States in Renaissance Italy

Abstract

Renaissance et Reforme / 149 in these recreations was apt to make a man as useful and valuable to his king as diplomatic or military skill.Green then undertakes to survey the state of literacy in the late medieval royal court, suggesting in passing that Manly's theory (Chaucer was educated at the Inns of Court) should give way before the evidence that he could have received as good or better education at the king's court.Here Green details the elements of the two-part curriculum, "noriture" and "lettrure," and provides an account of some of the books available and evidently read in noble and royal households.The last three chapters deal with the sort of literature that court poets pro duced: love poetry, literature designed to inculcate manners and morals, and literature intended to extol the fame of the court.Green's point of view here is to show how the poetic stances of later medieval poets -Chaucer's irony, for ex ample -may in part derive from changed conditions for poetry.Since other courtiers also practised poetry, it was difficult for a poet reading to the court to adopt a non-critical pose before his material.Self-conscious art had arrived.But literary scholars will find that the greatest service provided by these last three chapters is their re-evaluation of much familiar literature on grounds of its court origins.Information of considerable value and subjects for further reflection come through these pages.This splendid account of court influence on poetry will cause us to rethink the question whether it is evidence of bourgeois influence that the Squire of Low Degree rises through his merits alone to a position of eminence, in contrast to earlier heroes like Havelock or Octavian who require the right heritage as well as the right deeds.Or again do we see the bourgeois dependence on money reflected in Sir Launfal's disgrace when he has none, or is his lack of money simply a reflection of his not having gold enough to "maintain his degree," as any noble must (cp.Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," 1. 1441)?Do "London Lickpenny" and "A Libel of English Policy" clearly reflect the mercantile I bourgeois mind at work, as they seem to do, or is there still some sense of noble concern here too?To these specific questions Green gives no answers, but he does provide much evidence against which such questions may be intelligibly posed.In closing a word must be said on the design and typography of the book.Where so much care has evidently gone into the proofreading (I detected only four minor slips) and into a system of annotation that is both new and laudibly concise and informative, it is disturbing to find an unjustified right margin.If this practice is prompted by economic considerations, then I suppose we must minimize our grumbling and accept it along with computerized bills and a lack of fuel.But a book like this one, of lasting value and interest, deserves better of its publisher, and I for one hope that its design does not herald a new policy at the University of Toronto Press.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 398 citations exist upstream.