Robert Gaguin, Sir Thomas More, French humanist, Germain Brice, Germanus Brixius, court entertainments, socially dialogic, courtship, courtiership
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Robert Gaguin. The second involves Sir Thomas More and the French humanist, Germain Brice (known as Germanus Brixius), who dispute in verse the details of an Anglo-French sea battle of 1514. The Anglo-Scottish flytings considered involve an exchange between John Skelton and one Dundas, and flyting answers of Alexander Montgomerie, Sir Robert Sempill and an anonymous Scottish verse answer. The latter three of these date from around the time of the Northern Rebellion (1569).
The four domestic flytings examined are spread out over a century and take place between John Skelton and Christopher Garnish (1513), Thomas Smyth and William Gray (1540), Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Camel (c.1552) and John Taylor and William Fennor (1614). Originally such flytings seem to have been court entertainments, although they often voice rivalries that have their basis in personal, religious or political differences. When considered together they reveal a progressive movement away from the physical location of the court in flyting, though they all envisage the king as audience and adjudicator of the dispute.
In the three shorter chapters of Part Two I examine selections of verse answering that are grouped together under the heading of socially dialogic exchanges, and divided into the themes of marriage, friendship, and courtship/courtiership. These are not always amicable, but they do articulate, negotiate and dispute the dynamics of social relationships, and the rules that in practice, and probably more often in theory, govern them.
Chapter Three considers a selection of verses exchanges from the mid-sixteenth century debating the subject of marriage. These are arguments against and for marriage in which the latter takes precedence, and ones negotiating or debating the respective duties of husbands and wives. The poems explore some of the major concerns and anxieties found in the literature of the mid-sixteenth century regarding the status of marriage and the nature of the proper relationship between husbands and wives. They are examined here in their
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