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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer by Sebastian J. Langdell Robyn A. Bartlett (bio) Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer Sebastian J. Langdell Liverpool University Press, 2018. x + 224 pp. $130 cloth, $45 paperback. Sebastian J. Langdell's Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer is a wide-ranging and ambitious book, as the title alone indicates. In it, he presents Hoccleve as we may not habitually consider him: a religious writer concerned with navigating the choppy waters of orthodoxy, foregrounding prudence, discretion, and virtue as he did so; a mediator of these religious concerns, as well as transnational poetic ones; and, as we have long discussed him, the author of Chaucer's literary genesis. [End Page 213] Chapters one and two take up this mediatory role, and in chapter one, entitled "Reading and Moralization in The Series," Langdell foregrounds Hoccleve's alertness to ecclesiastical controversy, which he sees as exemplified in the Friend's moralizations. Hoccleve, for Langdell, walks the line between poetic creativity and orthodoxy; "tack[ing] on" these moralizations is one way that Hoccleve nods to both the need for and dangers of nuance in a time of religious turmoil (13, 17, 32). Chapter two, "Vice, Virtue, and Poetic Mediation in the Epistle of Cupid," focuses as much on Christine de Pizan, Deschamps, and Jean Gerson as on Hoccleve, and it is not always clear how this comparative approach advances the chapter's arguments, which include how Hoccleve's Series and Epistle "explore matters of political and ecclesiastical division, transnational exchange, literary taste, and specific instances of royal willfulness and betrayal" (35). For Langdell, Hoccleve leans into poetry's mediating powers, using "allusive language" to explore what is contentious or dangerous. Chapters three, four, and five all take up, variously, the centrality of Chaucer to Hoccleve's work, and Hoccleve's role in crafting a moral Chaucer who would not only be acceptable to orthodox audiences (chapter three, "Hoccleve, Chaucer, and the Architectonics of Fame"), but also whose religiosity would go on to influence the self-portraits of poets such as Lydgate (chapter five, "Hoccleve's Eucharist"). In this reading, Hoccleve is central to creating an English literary inheritance, even though he is often absent from it (182). Though chapter four does consider, in comparative terms, Piers Plowman and some well-known parallels between Langland and Hoccleve (104–07), it does, in the end, highlight Chaucer as well (112–37). It is in this last respect that Langdell's book offers one of its more convincing and useful throughlines: that, "in the face of an increasingly militant and repressive English Church" (5), Hoccleve gave us a religious and moral Chaucer, one clad in black and holding a rosary. Langdell goes on to suggest that this image in fact subtends Lydgate's own self-portrait (183–87). This claim reveals both the benefits and drawbacks of this study: its ambition means both that the sheer volume of material is daunting and that crafting a single, unifying argument is tricky. Langdell often loses sight of the idea that Hoccleve is an intermediary, and the book sometimes descends into summary (of, for instance, the circumstances surrounding Christine de Pizan, or Jean Gerson) and comparison, rather than analysis and argumentation. Particularly in the first two chapters, one wishes for more pointed attention to Hoccleve and his writing. As a result of this diffuse focus, Langdell's arguments are, sometimes, more conjectural than one might wish—or, rather, are presented as definitive when they are in fact conjectural. For example, Langdell perhaps makes too much of the correspondence between the [End Page 214] date of Hoccleve's return to health—1 November, 1414—and the opening date for the Council of Constance, which is suggestive, perhaps, but hardly conclusive (18). This kind of approach is unfortunately characteristic, appearing again with respect to Christine de Pizan, her son, and Anglo-French relations in general (50, 57); and dominating the discussion of prudence in chapter four, where Langdell's own use of the word sometimes substitutes for engagement with textual evidence (128–29). Langdell also frequently resorts to...