The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England by Ethan Knapp

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER late-medieval importance of the vernacular, in the largest sense of the term. The presentation of this edited material varies in its usefulness: Schaap’s list provides a practical bridge between the annotations in one manuscript and a critical edition of Piers Plowman. Jönsson and Voaden present their two texts in a convenient juxtaposition, even though the Middle English is not a translation of the Latin; one of the benefits of such an alignment, in fact, is to highlight gaps and omissions. But the editors’ choice to include the Middle English manuscript line numbers in the body of the text is less helpful, since the parenthetical numbers interfere significantly with the experience of reading. Kerby-Fulton and Hodie record the same important information about manuscript layout in a more friendly form. I found the archaeological work of transcription and editing the most constructive aspect of The Medieval Reader, in part because I found the organization of essays into cases of ‘‘professional reading’’ and ‘‘vernacular reading’’ unsatisfying. Nevertheless, the strengths of this collection lie in its particularities, and the varieties of inquiry included here do provide a number of useful perspectives on late-medieval manuscript studies. Jessica Brantley Yale University Ethan Knapp. The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Pp. x, 210. $40.00. The central contention of Ethan Knapp’s monograph is that, in addition to perceiving ‘‘Lollardy and the Lancastrians’’ as the shaping forces of early fifteenth-century writing, we should add a third term, ‘‘bureaucracy .’’ Whereas we have come to think of literary and bureaucratic discourse as wholly distinct if not inimical to each other, in fact the relation of these two kinds of writing bears closer inspection. The fifteenth century witnessed three key developments: the continued separation of the principal bureaucratic offices from the king’s household; the adoption of English as an official language of state; and the growing laicization of the staff of the central writing offices. Knapp situates Hoc396 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:12 PS REVIEWS cleve within these developments, and argues for his importance ‘‘not as an eccentric but as a representative of a significant alternative to the aureate predecessors confirmed as a lineage’’ by later critics (p. 12). This is a promising opening gambit; the Hoccleve of this book is indeed enmeshed in fundamentally bureaucratic culture. While Hoccleve does not emerge as exactly ‘‘eccentric,’’ Knapp’s book consistently does present him as a difficult and peculiar poet, balanced on representational knife-edges. He is more the companion of, say, Langland or Margery Kempe than he is of urbane Chaucer. Recent studies have focussed on Hoccleve as public poet (for instance, Paul Strohm’s England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 [1998], or Nicholas Perkins’ Hoccleve’s ‘‘Regiment of Princes’’: Counsel and Constraint [2001]). Despite the inevitably public orientation of bureaucracy, the Hoccleve of this book is, by contrast, an agonized and private figure, seeking, yet never achieving, a relation of protective and abiding presence with the powerful. The focus remains consistently on Hoccleve’s works. The title is a little misleading, since ‘‘the literature of late medieval England’’ doesn’t get a look in. On the contrary, Knapp takes any postHocclevian poets out of the picture by arguing that Hoccleve has ‘‘no progeny’’ (p. 11). This is a missed opportunity to consider that other intensely bureaucratic fifteenth-century poet, George Ashby, whose Prisoner’s Reflections open with a very clear reference to the opening of Hoccleve’s Series. Chapter 1 establishes the frame of the argument with the examples of Hoccleve’s own book of bureaucratic models, the Formulary, and ‘‘La Male Regle.’’ Hoccleve’s bureaucratic position was liminal, poised as it was between the status of scribe and that of gentleman, between a gift and a wage economy, between membership in the king’s household and a state bureaucracy. Scrutiny of both the Formulary and the petitionary text reveals a Hoccleve whose autobiographical particularity emerges from that liminality; it emerges only out of its obverse, bureaucratic anonymity: ‘‘The language of bureaucracy and that of...