Sebastian J. Langdell. Thomas Hoccleve. Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer

Abstract

For nearly 40 years Thomas Hoccleve toiled at the Privy Seal, a professional scribe stooping and staring ‘upon the sheepes skyn’ (The Regiment of Princes 1013). He rose to become one of the handful of senior clerks, and his sense of engagement with his profession is evidenced in the formulary of over a thousand documents, largely in French, some in Latin, he drew together late in his career. Nothing is known about him before he joined the Privy Seal and, whereas others of his contemporaries moved on to preferment, there he stayed. Apart from his work for the Privy Seal, his distinctive hand is recognized also in compilations he made of his own poetry. Presumably he had little time free to copy the works of other poets, though he did write but did not complete a small portion of the Trinity Confessio amantis, thus gaining the soubriquet Scribe E, and seemingly he contributed at least one addition to the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales.