274 NOTES AND QUERIES
Jennifer Britnell and Richard Britnell
(eds), Vernacular Literature and Current
Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century:
France, England and Scotland. Pp. xxv +
211 (Studies in European Cultural Transi-
tion 6). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. £45.00
(ISBN 0-7456-0093-9).
THERE should be more books like this little
volume of conference papers, though I confess
that its rather dry title and dull grey dust
jacket initially seem less than promising. Edit-
ing this collection of ten essays, Jennifer Brit-
nell and Richard Britnell have provided us
with a valuable opportunity to step back
from single-nation studies of literature in
order to view vernacular writing as it devel-
oped across three countries in the early six-
teenth century.
As one might expect, a focus on manuscripts
and historicity runs throughout. But the book
also presents a useful variety of perspectives,
extending from the relatively traditional style
of John Scattergood's chapter on English
poetry and the battle of Flodden to the Fou-
cauldian and Benvenistean dialectics that
Adrian Armstrong discusses at the end of his
fascinating essay on the recontextualization of
Jean Molinet's writing.
However, it does start rather slowly. An
opening chapter by Greg Walker devotes fif-
teen pages to an argument that most of us
would readily concede ± that the term `court
poet' as applied to Skelton is less complicated
than the reality of the poet's ambiguous
engagement with the early Tudor court. Yet
if this discussion seems at first unnecessary, its
relevance to the book as a whole quickly
becomes clear. Walker in fact addresses a
critical issue underlying nearly every chapter:
how does literature relate to the power struc-
tures of the early modern court?
Articles by Cynthia Brown on Pierre Grin-
gore and Jennifer Britnell on French antipapal
writing make up the second and third chapters,
and Walker's essay is later extended and devel-
oped by A. S. G. Edwards, who compares the
relative involvement of Dunbar and Skelton at
their respective courts. If Walker looks to
complicate the label of `court poet', Edwards
complicates the notion of the `court' itself.
Though he sees Dunbar `as insider, speaking
June 2002
out from within', he also notes that `Skelton's
poetic activities problematize the assumption
that it is useful to talk as if there was ever a
single, consistent attitude that constituted the
court'. A subsequent chapter on Lindsay and
James V by Sarah Carpenter discusses literat-
ure as current event, suggesting that James may
have deliberately used drama as `an oblique
political instrument'.
Christine Scollen-Jimack follows with an
essay on the funereal poetry of Octovien de
Saint Gelais and Clement Marot, arguing that
Marot's political relationship to Louise de
Savoie leads him to employ an innovative
form to lament her death. A closing chapter
by Julia Boffey deals with the printing in
England of texts translated from French.
Aside from Edwards's essay, only a few of
these articles explicitly compare the literature
of these three nations. The value in this book,
however, is that readers will easily form their
own connections.
Jason Powell
Mansfield College, Oxford
Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renais-
sance Europe. Pp. xii + 384. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2000. £35.00
(ISBN 0-300-08252-1).
IN his introduction, Anglo remarks that very
few military historians have focused on martial
arts ± that is, the actual techniques used by
combatants to kill. The further one progresses
through the book, the more apparent the rea-
son for this neglect becomes ± battles and
duels, stripped of their politics, characters
and rhetoric, are arid in the extreme. This is
no reflection of Anglo's style, which is eloquent
and lively. Yet, on-going disputes over which is
more advantageous, the thrust or the cut, the
long sword or the bastard sword, will fascinate
only those whose business it is to understand
fighting techniques of the past, feint by feint.
Unfortunately, as Anglo admits, even with all
the manuals extant, it is very difficult to do
this. The two major challenges facing the mili-
tary historian are (1) the impossibility of con-
veying in words and pictures a changing series
of actions, and (2) the fact that there has been
no real continuity in fighting styles from the