Regiment Of Princes Research Articles

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

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

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...

The Politics of Precarious Grief in Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes

The Politics of Precarious Grief in Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes

A New Hoccleve Literary Manuscript: The Trilingual Miscellany in London, British Library, MS Harley 219

Abstract This essay identifies a hand which copies and corrects much of the literary manuscript, London, British Library, MS Harley 219, as that of Thomas Hoccleve. Texts in Hoccleve’s handwriting include selections from Odo of Cheriton’s Fables and the Gesta Romanorum (a source for the Series), all of a unique copy of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and a glossary of French terms translated into Latin and English. Additionally, Hoccleve’s handwriting can be found in corrections to a French Secretum Secretorum (a source for The Regiment of Princes) that is otherwise copied in another hand. This essay offers preliminary observations on the literary implications of these identifications and attempts to situate these texts within Hoccleve’s career as a clerk and poet.

New Medieval Literatures 16 ed. by Laura Ashe, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase

Reviewed by: New Medieval Literatures 16 ed. by Laura Ashe, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase Roderick McDonald Ashe, Laura, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase, eds, New Medieval Literatures 16, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2016; hardback; pp. 288; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844334. Volume 16 of 'New Medieval Literatures' represents the series relaunch (following a change in publisher) of this highly respected periodical at the forefront of theoretical, philological, and historicizing methodologies in medieval literary and textual studies. The 2016 edition continues the tradition and presents eight long articles, each of which applies recent critical methodologies to its medieval subject matter. Two essays discuss the natural world in medieval text: Jonathan Morton's, contextualizing authoritative theologies of beast allegories and the bestiary, represented by the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaon, and Alexis Kellner Becker's, examining thirteenth-century English environmental anxieties expressed in Havelok the Dane. Two essays deal with the medieval political economy as it is expressed through text. George Younge explores monastic cultural production and associates the waning of Old English with the monastic economies of manuscript production, while Emily Dolmans delivers a literary-historical assessment of Anglo-Norman politics in the Welsh Marches. Four further essays explore textualities, literary culture and contextual analysis. Marco Nievergelt compares the rhetoric and didactics of the fourteenth-century Pèlerinage of the Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville with those of the Roman de la Rose, Marcel Elias looks at emotions in late Middle English Charlemagne romances as a means for exposing diverging views on crusading culture, Philip Knox examines the blurring of medieval generic boundaries between lyric and narrative writing, and Sebastian Langdell argues that Chaucer as represented in Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes is a result of the increasingly militant and repressive English Church. Roderick McDonald Sheffield, UK Copyright © 2018 Roderick McDonald

‘Heer Y die in thy presence’: The Rewriting of Martyrs in and after Hoccleve

The Remonstrance to Sir John Oldcastle by Thomas Hoccleve (c.1367–1426) was written in 1415 and survives in one of Hoccleve’s holograph manuscripts. It was later twice copied by Richard James (bap. 1591–1638), accompanied by copious notes rereading the poem in the light of Oldcastle’s then status as a proto-protestant martyr. This essay proposes that noticing James’s little-studied manuscript editions and the reading and editing practices in which they are engaged can, first, enrich the reception history of Hoccleve and other late-medieval writers; and, second, prompt a re-examination of Hoccleve’s own responses to the idea of martyrdom. Hoccleve’s layered use of allegory and analogy between exemplary figures and readers—including his own poetic persona—draws the public anti-Lollard rhetoric of the Remonstrance into contact with personal and penitential reflections in The Regiment of Princes and the Series, and I argue that the figure of the martyr is a significant touchstone to assess the resulting blend of discourses and perspectives. Finally, I suggest that the conceptual gap between Hoccleve’s and James’s copies of the Remonstrance can be narrowed by recognizing that they are both recontextualizations of the poem, and their different contexts and forms effect their meanings.

The Manuscript as an Ambigraphic Medium: Hoccleve’s Scribes, Illuminators, and Their Problems

This essay argues that late medieval manuscript producers were both aware of and at times troubled by the ontological ambiguity of the medium in which they worked. Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic philosophy provides an apt framework for characterizing this ambiguity, which rests on the manuscript’s dual status as both an allograph and an autograph. Embodying features of both, the manuscript demands a third category, which I term the “ambigraph.” Through an examination of manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, I demonstrate how both scribes and illuminators struggled with a self-referential text that presents itself as both an original document and the performance of a script. When called upon by the text they copied to produce pictorial evidence of Chaucer’s likeness, scribes and illuminators left behind evidence in both word and image of their perturbation at this brief, as well as their reluctance and refusal to fulfill it. These exertions, I argue, offer a practical theorization of a premodern media concept in lieu of such a theorization in words.

Chaucer, the Chaucer Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers

Abstract Although the monastic characters in the Canterbury Tales have received considerable critical attention, the engagement of actual monastic readers, especially female monastic readers, with Geoffrey Chaucer's works and works in the Chaucerian tradition has been little studied. This essay considers the ways in which women religious at the Benedictine nunnery of Amesbury and the Brigittine nunnery of Syon read and used works by Chaucer, as well as works by John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve that form part of the Chaucerian tradition, in the later medieval and early modern periods. Nuns in these communities read such potentially surprising texts as Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, and Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes. The women religious of Amesbury and Syon drew upon these texts to develop rhetorical strategies and courses of action in complex political situations. Furthermore, the texts played important roles in the sophisticated devotional cultures of these monastic communities.

Reality as Dream:

Abstract This essay seeks to make an account of the nature of Thomas Hoccleve's inner life in light of “dream.” Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes and the Series, despite their obvious indebtedness to the patterns of medieval dream vision, never describe formal dreams of the poet. Regarding this problem, I argue that Hoccleve dreams a dream while he is awake: dreme is a figurative notion for him, referring to his benumbed state of mind or “wit.” The insomniac Hoccleve, afflicted with melancholic “thought,” describes his feelings as dull and heavy, and the dullness makes his mind asleep even when he is awake. It is this languid inner condition that he calls dreme. In the Hocclevian dream, the mind is given a fluid image and fails to be captured precisely. Hoccleve develops the dream vision tradition to a paradoxical extreme: while he remains in reality, he reaches a dreamworld with his daydreaming mind.

Nothing But Change and Variance:

Abstract With historicism on the wane, now is a good time to reexamine Thomas Hoccleve's politics. The resurgence of interest in Hoccleve coincided with the advent of critical historicism in Middle English scholarship. Debate on Hoccleve has been sharply divided between those who see him as a royalist and those who see him as politically unaligned. Analysis of Hoccleve's persona in the Regiment of Princes—the most poetically prominent feature of his most important political poem—and its relation to the figure of Fortune demonstrates that, if anything, ideological readings of Hoccleve have underplayed his royalism.

Stanza Markers in MSS Arundel 38 and Harley 4866 of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes

Stanza Markers in MSS Arundel 38 and Harley 4866 of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes

Versions of “Manliness” in the Poetry of Chaucer, Langland, and Hoccleve

The terms for manliness to be considered here, manhood, man, and manly, did not belong to the official moral discourse of medieval England, as displayed in the many sermons and treatises of the time. Rather, they represent judgments passed in common parlance, at a level of everyday usage for which the evidence is more scanty. In his book The Structure of Complex Words, William Empson was able to devote three whole chapters to a single such “rich and shifting term of praise,” the word honest, drawing on the great range of post-medieval writings that display its various senses and implications.1 Medieval sources allow no such fullness of treatment, but they are enough to exhibit some more modest complexity in their versions of “manliness,” even where consideration is confined, as here, to some poems of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Since manly was a term not subject to the discipline of clerical definition, unlike words such as patient or charitable, its meanings are to be inferred from whatever in the broad general background of ideas about masculinity may seem to be called for in each particular context. Most prominent among these was the idea of male courage and prowess in battle.2 When Troilus rides with his posse past Criseyde’s house, Chaucer describes him thus:

Editors and Scribes in Two Clerk's Tale Cruxes

Editors and Scribes in Two <i>Clerk's Tale</i> Cruxes

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England

Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England

A Holograph Copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes

A Holograph Copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes Linne R. Mooney The focus of this article is the British Library manuscript Royal 17 D.XVIII, a copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. I here argue first, on paleographic, codicological, and linguistic grounds, that this manuscript is written by the hand of the author Thomas Hoccleve; second, that the text of the Regiment in this manuscript represents a revised version of the poem written in 1412–13, in which the author had made alterations reflecting the changed circumstances of himself, of his dedicatee, Henry of Derby, and of the country a year or two after the completion and first dissemination of the poem; and third, that this manuscript was in fact the copy given to John of Lancaster, later duke of Bedford, to whom a balade written at the end may be addressed. British Library, Royal 17 D.XVIII: A Hoccleve Holograph We have more identified examples of Thomas Hoccleve’s handwriting than of any other vernacular English medieval writer: three manuscripts of his own literary works, two and a half leaves of a copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, documents written in his daily work as a Clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal, and a formulary he wrote for that office.1 The [End Page 263] formulary survives as British Library, Additional 24062, a volume of 201 parchment leaves, mostly written by Hoccleve in an informal, loose cursive version of his hand but also, as I shall argue below, containing one quire that includes examples of his neater, more formal, hand.2 The manuscripts of his literary work, recently published in a facsimile by the Early English Text Society, are Durham University Library, Cosin V.iii.9, folios 13–95, and Henry E. Huntington Library MSS 111 and 744, folios 25–68v.3 Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes identified Hoccleve as one of the five scribes who wrote the Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.2, copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (his contribution, folios 82r–84r);4 and more tentatively as one of the correctors for Adam Pinkhurst’s copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392D, the so-called Hengwrt manuscript (his corrections on folios 83v, 138v, and 150), besides a number of documents written in the course of his work as a Clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal.5 I recently published a list of Privy Seal documents written by Hoccleve’s hand, ranging from his earliest years in that office until a time within a year of his death in 1426.6 In the introduction to the facsimile of Hoccleve’s holograph literary works, John Burrow and Ian Doyle comment that the three manuscripts reproduced in the facsimile contain “all the poems currently attributed to him . . . [w]ith the important exception of Hoccleve’s major work The Regiment of Princes, of which no holograph copy is known.”7 I here put forward an argument that a holograph of the Regiment does survive, British Library, Royal 17 D.XVIII, which has not previously been recognized as being written by Hoccleve’s hand.8 [End Page 264] The manuscript Royal 17 D.XVIII has been overlooked by scholars for a number of reasons: first, it and most manuscripts of the Regiment have remained in the shadow of the two sumptuously prepared manuscripts of the poem generally agreed to be original presentation copies, British Library MSS Arundel 38 and Harley 4866; second, it was dated to the quarter-century after Hoccleve’s death by J. A. Burrow in his 1994 biography of Hoccleve;9 third, the hand of this manuscript differs somewhat in general aspect from that of the accepted Hoccleve holographs, as I will discuss further below. The identification of Hoccleve’s hand in Royal 17 D.XVIII depends upon many factors: paleographical, codicological, and linguistic. Appendix A below lists and illustrates the characteristics of Hoccleve’s handwriting that have been identified in manuscripts already attributed to him: the holograph manuscripts, the formulary, and his two-and-a-half-folio stint in Trinity College R.3.2. These characteristic letter forms also occur...

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Teaching the Middle Ages on Film: Visual Narrative and the Historical Record

A comparatively new medium, film can be used for a range of discussions about the ways in which history is recorded, edited, shaped, and remembered; it is also useful for teaching contemporary interpretation of older literatures. Like historical fiction – or works of art more generally – movies with historical themes are most productively studied in their broader contexts, alongside, and in conjunction with, written sources. The classroom provides a perfect venue for such study. While reading and analyzing older texts, students can also be taught to read films for their authenticity, their accuracy or inaccuracy of detail in portraying the past, and for effective (or ineffective) use of purposeful or intentional anachronism, among other approaches. Film enhances the study of texts; careful reading of texts may, in turn, lead to more critical evaluation of film.

Haunted Hoccleve?: &lt;i&gt;The Regiment of Princes&lt;/i&gt;, The Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead

Thomas Hoccleve’s medieval and modern readers have repeatedly been drawn to the relationship between the Privy Seal clerk and his older and more celebrated contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Hoccleve, of course, invokes his “maistir” in The Regiment of Princes, and had a picture of Chaucer included in its early copies, drawing attention in the text to the portrait’s representational fidelity and symbolic power. 1 Hoccleve’s “canonization” of Chaucer—as a literary progenitor, as a quasi-religious icon, as a model of authoritative advice, and as the founder of a national poetic tradition—have all been the subject of extended discussion, circling around the familiar trope of “father Chaucer,” 2 and recently coloring it with a renewed interest in the public, political, and ideological positioning of fifteenth-century vernacular poetry. 3 In this essay I shall discuss some Chaucerian borrowings and echoes in The Regiment of Princes, many of which have been overlooked or little discussed in the heat of these wider debates. Hoccleve tells us that

Haunted Hoccleve? The Regiment of Princes, the Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead

Haunted Hoccleve? <i>The Regiment of Princes,</i> the Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead

The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve

The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve Sarah Tolmie University of Waterloo No man ever writ, but for money. —Samuel Johnson Thomas Hoccleve has undergone a lot of rehabilitation lately. Recent forms of historicism have saved him from lingering censure for dementia, effeminacy, and venality, and enlisted him instead as a participant in the larger social developments of his age: the bureaucratization of fifteenth-century society,1 the drama of assimilating Lancastrian rule,2 the fraught and contradictory rise of a money economy,3 the task of domesticating Chaucer into a national icon.4 He has been reassessed as an ideologue, a translator, a feminist,5 a civil servant, an advi1 See Ethan Knapp, ‘‘Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve ’s Formulary and La Male Regle,’’ Speculum 74 (1999): 357–76, and his book The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). 2 See, for example, Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 141–48, 180–86, 197–214; and Derek Pearsall, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,’’ Speculum 69 (1994): 386–410. 3 See Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘‘Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money,’’ Exemplaria 13 (2001): 173–214. 4 Selected examples include J. A. Burrow, ‘‘Hoccleve and Chaucer,’’ in Chaucer Traditions : Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 54–61; David R. Carlson, ‘‘Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait,’’ HLQ 54 (1991): 283–300; Albrecht Classen, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Independence from Chaucer: A Study of Poetic Emancipation,’’ Fifteenth-Century Studies 16 (1990): 59–81; Ethan Knapp, ‘‘Eulogies and Usurpations: Hoccleve and Chaucer Revisited,’’ SAC 21 (1999): 247–73 ; Jeanne E. Krochalis, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Chaucer Portrait ,’’ ChauR 21 (1986–87): 234–45; James H. MacGregor, ‘‘The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum and in the Troilus Frontispiece,’’ ChauR 11 (1977): 338–50; Tim William Machan, ‘‘Textual Authority and the Works of Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Henryson,’’ Viator 23 (1992): 281–99. 5 See Catherine Batt, ‘‘Hoccleve And. Feminism? Negotiating Meaning in the Regiment of Princes,’’ in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1996), pp. 55–84; Ruth Nissé, ‘‘‘Oure Fadres Olde and Modres’: Gender, Heresy, and Hoccleve’s Literary Politics,’’ SAC 21 (1999): 275–99; Jennifer E. Bryan, ‘‘Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint,’’ PMLA 117, no. 5 (2002): 1172–87; Anna Torti, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Attitude toward Women: ‘I Shoop Me Do My Peyne PAGE 341 341 ................. 16596$ CH10 11-01-10 14:07:34 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER sor to princes,6 a sufferer of psychotic illness.7 Evidence for such identifications has been drawn from his life records, and from the formulary he compiled for the office of Privy Seal during his tenure as a clerk, but chiefly from his poetry. Yet his specific status as a writer of poetry has remained secondary in much recent criticism: the poet has become a prisoner of context, administrative, political, or cultural. This does Hoccleve a particular disservice because the primary identity of his textual persona is that of poet; he is constantly and consciously engaged in the business of collecting, collating, translating, soliciting advice on, seeking patronage of, procrastinating over, and, above all, trying to sell,8 poetry. The writing of poetic texts, and the implications of this action for the writer of them, and for the various readers, patrons, and buyers of them is the overriding concern of his work. My contention is that Hoccleve’s mission was to create the secular poet, himself, as a professional subject and to figure him explicitly into the economy of representation. No other Privy Seal clerk working in the first quarter of the fifteenth century has left a significant body of poetry; Prentys, Arondel, and the other colleagues Hoccleve mentions in his work shared a literate coterie culture but did not write poems about it, or about anything else, at and Diligence / To Wynne Hir Loue by...