Abstract
Reviews 239 Parergon 20.1 (2003) frame, its strength lies in various individual essays, in particular those of Dickinson and Sharpe, Rabin, Marland, Quinn, Andrews and Ward, which do indeed provide insightful studies of aspects of this interesting area of social history. Deborah Williams Faculty of Law/School of Humanities The University of Western Australia Knapp, Ethan, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001; cloth; pp. x, 210; RRP US$40.00; ISBN 0271021357. âIt is, indeed, hard to image a form of literary history that would not be genealogical... In the assumed parthenogenesis of this tradition, the metaphor of paternity, the relation of fathers and sons, has always been centralâ (p. 107). The same might be said of an author study that avoids the assumption of literariness and yet this is, precisely, Ethan Knappâs intelligent and provocative strategem for reading Thomas Hoccleveâs literary works. Hoccleveâs career as a bureaucrat â a clerk â is central to, not excluded from, his production as a poetical writer. Knapp organises his study into six chapters that treat, in turn, Hoccleveâs major output. The Formulary is read both as autobiography and âan easily referenced collection of model documentsâ (p. 31), and âLa Male Regleâ (1405) because it âsubstantiates [the] links between bureaucratic practices and the construction of autobiography in Hoccleveâs verseâ (p. 36-7). His translation of Christine de Pisanâs LâEpistre au Dieu dâAmours, known as the Letter of Cupid (1402), deploys Christineâs âradical critique of the prevailing connections between gender and authorityâ (p. 50) but cannot replicate her authority of experience. Hoccleveâs problem is structurally, rather than ontologically, similar to hers. Hoccleve is one of the emergent lay class of clerics; furthermore, he is married; thus, âHoccleve was not situated to speak for the established cultural traditions of either courtly verse [chevalerie] or clerkly didacticism [clergie]â (p. 71). Knappâs reading of the Regement of Princes (1410-1412) thematises two aspects of Hoccleveâs preoccupation with autobiography, or his use of textuality to represent selfhood. The poem is âa generic hybridâ: the first part (prologue) is âone of Hoccleveâs most typical compositions, the begging poemâ while the second section, âthe Regement proper ⌠constitutes the first example found in 240 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) English of that most popular of medieval genres, the mirror of princesâ (p. 81). Knapp first positions the Regement alongside John Carpenterâs Liber Albus (1419) to find âa vision of writing as a supplement to the fragile human bodyâ (p. 85). For Carpenter, no less than Hoccleve, âthe bureaucratic technologies of writingâ offer, at once, a diagnostic occasion to lament the physical and mental costs of writing â âMy bak unbuxum,â âStommak ⌠whom stowpynge out of dreede/Annoyeth sore;â âoure yen/ Upon the whyte mochil sorwe dryen,â the imperative to âknytte/⌠Mynde, ye, and handâ â and â âthe promise of a victory over time and ageâ (p. 90-92). Knapp argues that Hoccleve uses this promise to reject the Boethian consolations traditionally invoked in such a context. Instead, âHoccleve chooses to represent himself as having found consolation not in philosophy but in the impossible home of textualityâ (p. 106). This conclusion is at some distance from the âauspicious opportunity for the development of serious English propagandistic verseâ (p. 81) which, Knapp acknowledges, is the way literary history has usually read the Regement. Knappâs position here is not to gainsay such a judgement but, more shrewdly, to suspend such readings by first attending to the Regementâs âtraces of the Privy Sealâ (p. 83); thus the prologue is an integral â and compelling â part of the work rather than a distraction. Knapp is, I think, less persuasive in dealing with a second theme in the Regement which he considers in a chapter titled âEulogies and Usurpations: Father Chaucer in the Regement of Princesâ. While the argument makes the wellestablished New Historical move of reading the circulation of a textual trope in the trajectory of historical events â the antagonistic relation between Henrys IV and V provides a model for Hoccleveâs relation to Chaucer â this same move loosens Knapp...
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