The word courtier can bring to mind what Hamlet called “waterflies,” mere social climbers hoping to survive palace politics. A more accurate portrayal of these court functionaries emerges in this study of Nicolaus Mameranus (1500–65), a Catholic scholar born in Mamer in southwestern Luxembourg, whom Holy Roman emperor Charles V named a Count Palatine and poet laureate in 1555. Matthew Tibble does not offer a complete biography but narrows his focus to Mameranus's work at the court of Mary Tudor and her husband Philip II during his English visit from March to July 1557. The result is an insightful look at the life of a working courtier who was indeed upwardly mobile but nevertheless adroitly navigated the cross-currents of patronage, politics, and theology in mid-sixteenth-century England. Tibble seeks to “contextualize the marriage [of Mary and Philip] within a wider conversation about Imperial dynasty and Catholic Reformation” (8), and to “question the current argument that the Marian church developed a Catholic Reformation theology and spirituality that was completely unified with that which was developing throughout Europe” (10).
Mameranus, sometimes derided by contemporaries for flaunting his laureate status, displays, in Tibble's view, “the anxieties of an unrecognized poet suffering under the realities of the early modern patronage system” (23–24). His humorous Beso las Manos (I kiss your hands) is thus “a complex satire of the poetic trade” (16), later revised in a more serious vein for presentation to Mary and presenting the poet as vates and “imparter of divine wisdom” (30). With likely an inflated sense of his own importance, Mameranus sought to benefit Mary's administration by commenting on “intercultural relations at court, the progress of religious reformation, the balance of power within the royal couple's co-monarchy, and even monetary policy” (33). Such a broad range of topics was no doubt intended to impress the queen and hopefully lead to greater royal favor.
The new English monarchy was for Mameranus an opportunity to reinvigorate the Catholic church in Northern Europe, a purpose that lay behind his encomiastic marriage poem Gratulatorium, completed a year after the wedding of Mary and Philip II of Spain, in which the queen is portrayed as leading England's reconciliation with Rome. Tibble contrasts Mameranus's epithalamion for them with that of contemporary Dutch poet Hadrianus Junius, the Philippeis (1554). Mameranus alters the generic convention to stress the agency of both partners, effectively raising Mary's political profile. Hardly the submissive virgin, she poetically welcomes Philip to England with a full panoply of her autonomy. Mameranus gives weight to their “co-monarchy of equality” and “deliberately obfuscates any division of roles” (63), privileging the political functioning of both king and queen and opening a poetic consideration of “the Spanish expectation that Philip would be crowned and the English fear of foreign interference in their polity” (68). Mameranus emerges here as both energetic courtier and polymath eager to influence royal views.
Tibble argues that a celebratory English mood in 1557, buoyed by the victory at St. Quentin, elevated Mary's Catholic agency. His Psalmi Davidis Quinque translated five psalms and offered reflections on topics such as “The Duty of a Prince” and “The Vices of the Court.” Together they reveal his pre-Reformation Catholic emphasis and a responsiveness to humanistic influences. Clearly adopting the role of learned advisor to princes, Mameranus does not hesitate to guide the monarch with “spiritual instruction, [a] polemical defense of the institutional Church, and patristic scholarship” (136). A lengthy chapter on his defense of Catholicism reveals the courtier's immersion in the theological disputes affecting London and Cologne.
Tibble's monograph commands a large array of contemporary sources and contains several appendixes offering English translations (by Tibble and Gary Vos) of Mameranus's Beso las Manos, Gratulatorium, Psalmi Davidis Quinque, and Oratio Dominica. The bibliography of Mameranus's complete publications and of primary and secondary sources also will make this work a useful springboard for further research into the interface of politics, literature, and religion during the Marian era in England.
