'Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour': Hoccleve's Amplification of the Imagery and Intimacy of Henry Suso's Ars Moriendi

Abstract

Thomas Hoccleve makes several changes to his source text in his early-fifteenth-century English verse translation of Dominican Henry Suso's fourteenth-century Latin Ars Moriendi . Most noteworthy is the terminology surrounding the personification of Death: in Suso this alternates between imago and similitudo while Hoccleve refers simply to 'th'ymage'. Hoccleve's translation uses more homely and imagistic terms in order to force the reader into a closer affective identification with the figure of the dying man. This textually-produced intimacy furthers the larger social-rehabilitative project of the Series . Rather than a crude translation of Suso, Hoccleve's text is a subtle, profound Middle English contribution to the Ars Moriendi genre.