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 J. A. T. Smith Sebastian J. Langdell. Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020 (paperback edition). Pp. x, 224. £90.00 cloth; £29.95 paper; £24.95 e-book. Like Thomas Hoccleve’s (1368–1426) own resistance to a “dichromatic mentality of error and correction” (15)—a social and political necessity in an early Lancastrian England that tied political legitimacy to religious orthodoxy—Sebastian Langdell’s book is one that resists simple characterization. As its title suggests, it works within several different strands of thought—fifteenth-century orthodoxy and heresy, Anglo-French political relations, and Chaucerian genealogies (i.e., poets who conceived of themselves as poetic heirs). As a study, however, Langdell’s book is not confined narrowly to those strands. Fundamentally, he offers a series of extended close readings primarily of Hoccleve’s major works (The Epistle of Cupid [1402], The Regiment of Princes [1410–11], and the Series [1419–26]) in dialogue with other key texts from the period broadly conceived (Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Dante’s Commedia, among others). He posits a “mediatory” approach for Hoccleve while elevating the poet’s status in the arena of late medieval English poetry, part of a recent trend in his poetic rehabilitation. In large measure, however, the book reads as a collection of distinct essays rather than as a synthetic whole with common purpose; two of the chapters, the first and the third, have been published in earlier forms in Medium Ævum and New Medieval Literatures respectively, and the final product continues to bear signs of that early division. Langdell states that his main purpose is to “[situate] Thomas Hoccleve as an individual who cultivates, throughout his works, the role of poetic [End Page 315] mediator—‘intermediary’ in the most virtuous sense, and also in the most explicitly Christian sense—and who uses his poetic works to engage with contemporary religious reform movements and religious debate” (1). What Langdell means, however, by Hoccleve’s approach as poetic mediator in “the most virtuous sense” or “explicitly Christian sense” is not immediately transparent. Only slowly during the course of the analysis does his meaning emerge: conciliatory conformance and submissiveness to the larger hierarchical and socially authoritative powers of king, Church, and popular opinion are, according to Langdell, a laudatory form of prudence. Why this is “the most virtuous” or “explicitly Christian” is unclear, since hope, faith, and charity are usually considered the highest of the Christian virtues, and the most laudable and distinctly Christian form of mediation is arguably saintly intercession or clerical pastoralism, not secular poetry. Nonetheless, Langdell links this desire for mediation to an amorphous fear on Hoccleve’s part of being cast out or punished for religious or political heterodoxy. In the first chapter, “‘What world is this? How vndirstande am I?’: Reading and Moralization in the Series,” Langdell considers the addition of moralizations from the Gesta Romanorum tradition to the tales in the Series against the backdrop of the Council of Constance (1414–18), arguing that the moralizations provide the accepted and monovalent readings that would ensure an orthodox hermeneutic in the face of theological scrutiny. By comparing the interrogatory process at Constance with an analogous moment of questioning in the Series, Langdell demonstrates how Hoccleve’s anxiety about being incompletely read or misread could be a sign of his own fears about heterodoxy. In aligning orthodoxy with interrogatory procedure at Constance, though, Langdell takes for granted that the approach of the Council of Constance necessarily indicated orthodox approbation, eliding the Hussite and Wycliffite rejections with conciliar authority. This assumption, however, is not necessarily justified. While many Englishmen were conciliarists, not all were. As Alexander Russell points out, moreover, while Hoccleve was working in the office of the Privy Seal at the same time that the Council of Constance took place, and while he would have presumably seen the Crown’s diplomatic instructions through the office of the Privy Seal...