Thomas Hoccleve Research Articles

Imago Mortis

Imago Mortis Bridget Whearty Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Ashby Kinch. Leiden: Brill, 2013. <http://www.brill.com/imago-mortis> One of the joys of being a medievalist today is the exploding growth of digital access. It seems that every month a new library or museum announces an ambitious digitization program. In the face of this glut of availability, there is a pressing need for smart studies engaging deeply with medieval images. Ashby Kinch’s Imago Mortis: Mediating Image of Death in Late Medieval Book Culture is one such study. Imago Mortis is an ambitious book, exploring cross-pollinations between didactic and literary works, manuscript illumination, wall paintings, cadaver tombs, late medieval religious traditions on the commemoration of the dead, and local and international political maneuvering in England and English-occupied Paris during the 1420s and 30s. Through these nodes, Kinch traces how visual and verbal artists draw on, adapt, and transform each other’s traditions in ways that are sometimes complementary, sometimes competitive, and nearly always in the service of making death more palatable to their powerful patrons. It would have been significantly easier to study one or two of these topics more deeply and in isolation, but it is in teasing out this vast network that Imago Mortis does its most valuable work. As Kinch puts it, “attending closely to the creative re-interpretation of both conventional and novel images of death in the medieval period opens up important dialogues: between literary and visual forms; between artists and the patrons for whom they produced their work; between the political and religious institutions that competed for the psychological and social energies of the late medieval individual; and between ourselves and the past” (276). In Chapter One, “Affirmative Visions of Dying in Illustrations of Henry Suso’s ‘De Scientia,’” Kinch shows how three manuscripts pair Suso’s vision of the lonely bad death with illustrations showing a good end surrounded by community. For the visual artists illuminating these manuscripts, Moriens, the dying one, is supported in death by the same institutions that supported him in life: a good friend (in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munchen Cod. gall. 28), a loving family (in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS IV. III), and an attending cleric (in London, British Library, Additional MS 37049). Rather than dismissing these craftsmen as bad readers of the texts they illustrate, Kinch reads disagreements between Suso’s text and accompanying illustrations as visual [End Page 301] artists’ thoughtful critiques and deliberate transformation of the textual tradition they accompany. Chapter Two, “Verbo-Visual Mirrors of Mortality in Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Lerne for to Die’” turns to the only extant Middle English verse translation of Suso’s “De Scientia.” Although it begins by analyzing a deathbed illustration in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 53, this chapter is not really concerned with connecting Hoccleve’s poem with a specific death culture, visual arts tradition. Instead, it traces how Hoccleve’s verse aestheticizes Suso’s Latin prose, arguing that this highly wrought poetic form serves as a tool for self-promotion, highlighting the English writer and his virtuosity. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Hoccleve differentiates himself from Chaucer through his preoccupation with death and loneliness, Kinch argues that Hoccleve depicts Chaucer as the poet who transcends death, but that he portrays himself as a poet who faces death, thus creating a space for himself outside of Chaucer’s shadow as well as outside the reach of meddling friends and worldly ambition. The intimate links between worldly ambition and patronage are a central topic of Chapter Three, “Commemorating Power in the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead,” which analyzes luxury images of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Here Kinch reveals how aristocrats co-opt an art form that began as clerical critique of aristocratic power. Through patronage of exquisite books and monuments, aristocrats turned this satire of their class’s failings to their advantage. The leveling power of death turns out to be something of a lie when patronage is taken into account. All men must die, but the wealthy can purchase rich memorials that ensure the survival of their names and memories, urging those...

Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England and France: The Transmission and Reception of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’Amours and Thomas Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid

Although it seems likely that Hoccleve’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’Amours was motivated by his desire to emulate her success as an author, this article shows that his Letter of Cupid played at best a limited role in establishing his literary reputation. While Christine could exercise a degree of control over the copying of her text, Hoccleve could not, and, as a result, his poem was circulated anonymously and often in damaged or truncated forms. This discrepancy is read as revelatory of differences between the modes of authorship available to Middle French and Middle English poets. Hoccleve’s status as a victim of the literary culture in which he wrote is not unequivocal, however, since the indeterminate attitude toward women that characterizes the Letter may have been a quality with which he deliberately imbued his text: thanks to his firsthand knowledge of the London book trade, Hoccleve was well placed to appreciate the potential popularity of such a versatile poem. Since the Letter is extant in ten non-autograph copies, it appears that a measure of that popularity was realized, even if the personal fame that might have accompanied it remained elusive.

Competing Archives, Competing Histories: French and Its Cultural Locations in Late-Medieval England

In his seminal article, “Thinking English Law in French: The Angevins and the Common Law,” Paul Hyams examines the surprising number of lasting legal terms “that started life as French words” and argues “that so much Frenchness indicates that more of the crucially experimental but constructive thinking behind the early Common Law than I had previously imagined may have originated not in Latin, still less in English, but in the French language.” This is striking, I think, because experimental or creative thought is not often enough attributed to legal clerks, civil servants, or scribes in any language or century. I have been interested in “office creativity” because many late-medieval writers were bureaucrats by day and “moonlighted” as literary authors or scribes after hours: cases such as Geoffrey Chaucer's, Thomas Usk's, Thomas Hoccleve's, John Audelay's, and, from internal evidence, likely William Langland's, are already well known. Contributing to this ferment, though more rarely identifiable, are the...

Mirror, Mirror: Princely Hermeneutics, Practical Constitutionalism, and the Genres of the English Fürstenspiegel

The “mirror for princes” or Fürstenspiegel challenges us to understand how this ostensibly practical and political genre of writing was understood in contemporary contexts, given the ubiquity and variability of its forms over time. This article posits the importance of mirror-texts as constitutional writings, especially in the English fifteenth century. It investigates aspects of Fürstenspiegel texts relating to their accretive and “sedimented” qualities, a term that has been used for genre analysis by Fredric Jameson. It explicates the self-representations of mirror-texts as didactic guides that try to educate and to constitute a prince, especially in the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Fortescue, where the prince is ideologically understood not just as an individual but as a self-authorizing embodiment of the basic principles of law. The analysis concludes by suggesting the broader significance of mirror-texts as a politically foundational genre of sovereignty, both for the times in which they were written and for the historical discourses of constitutionalism that have come down to the present day.

Renaissance Petrarchism and Medieval Begging in Robert Sidney’s Sonnets

This essay explores the vernacular genealogies behind the rhetorical interlacement of disease, desire, and poverty in the sonnets of Robert Sidney, with references to Shakespeare’s sonnets; and it considers the implications of bringing the medieval languages of poetic selfhood to bear on our interpretation of Renaissance texts. I argue that Sidney’s figural alignment of bodily sickness, pecuniary lack, and unrequited desire contains traces of medieval English begging poetry—namely the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve. Consequently, the essay raises questions about the relationship between early modern Petrarchan poetry—a Renaissance discourse par excellence—and the discursive structures and forms of subjectivity found in English medieval poetry, problematizing traditional accounts of English literary history.

The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt Elon Lang The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” By David Watt. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2013. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo14387537.html In The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” David Watt takes on one of Middle English literary scholarship’s persistent interpretive challenges: to characterize the thematic and formal unity in the sequence of disparate poems and other texts by the early fifteenth-century London poet Thomas Hoccleve that modern scholars simply dub the Series. Characterizing this compilation has been complicated by Hoccleve’s bibliographic record, which includes four surviving holograph manuscripts, one of which preserves a copy of the whole Series in Hoccleve’s own hand. Scholars have long been interested in the Series because of its pseudo-autobiographical narrative frame, in which a first person narrator named Thomas discusses the process of composing and assembling the book as it is being written—transforming it into something quite different from what he originally intended. This narrator also describes the process of recovering from a mental illness and reforming his moral reputation in his community, prompting numerous critics to analyze the Series in terms of Hoccleve’s psychology and rhetorical strategies. Watt, however, encourages us to view the narrative of Thomas’s ad hoc process of composition and compilation as a crucial part of the narrative of his illness and recovery. Watt argues that Thomas’s story about how his book changes over time as he imagines the needs of his readers serves as Hoccleve’s model for spiritual reform. Part of Watt’s argument is traditionally historicist, in which he reads the narratives of personal reform and textual assembly in the Series against the backdrop of the ecumenical Council of Konstanz (1414–1418) and its goal to reform the Church in the wake of the Great Schism. Hoccleve would have had this Council on his mind while writing parts of the Series due to his clerical work in England’s Office of the Privy Seal—through which the English government communicated with its ambassadors at the Council. While the conciliar context alone is an innovation in Hoccleve criticism, Watt grounds this reading in a detailed study of manuscript evidence to illustrate how Hoccleve conceptualized [End Page 134] the purpose of his texts and their functions for his readers. As such, Watt provides the most convincing account yet published on the formal and thematic unity of the Series. Watt finds this unity in the way the text dramatizes its “making”—its piecemeal assembly as both a composition and material book over time—as a model for personal moral reform. This model shows reform to be fraught with the same challenges as textual production: an individual’s own problems, external interventions by other people, and problems with unforeseen worldly circumstances. The strength of Watt’s argument is in how it rests on the premise that “the Series’ coherence as a unit of analysis depends on both literary and bibliographic principles” (14). With this multi-modal approach, Watt organizes his book into chapters that focus on each of the four surviving manuscripts that Hoccleve made himself, with a fifth chapter on one of the most significant scribal copies of the Series. In his first chapter, Watt considers how the various dedicatees of short occasional verses in Huntington Library MS HM 111 (which does not contain any part of the Series) compare with the audiences Hoccleve seems to envision for different parts of the Series. Watt’s comparisons reveal what he calls a “stratified” audience that includes members of the reading public, Hoccleve’s bureaucratic colleagues, and his noble patrons—each of whom were invited “to judge his texts by imagining how well they would have served the needs of other readers” (40). Although Watt does not consider this a call for empathy, he does suggest that an audience’s perception of other readers might lay the foundations for personal moral reform by considering other individuals as models. In the second chapter, Watt explains how fifteenth-century English readers voraciously sought redemption from sin in vernacular religious texts. As a representative example, Watt...

Alternative Possibility in Fourteenth-Century Philosophy and the Development of Allegorical Narrative in the Work of Robert Holcot and Thomas Hoccleve

Alternative Possibility in Fourteenth-Century Philosophy and the Development of Allegorical Narrative in the Work of Robert Holcot and Thomas Hoccleve

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.

The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt Matthew Fisher David Watt, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series.” Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013. $99.95. Writing poetry about writing poetry is a temptation that few poets have resisted. Thomas Hoccleve is not among that select few. In the middle of [End Page 347] the twentieth century, Robert Graves dismissed “what passes as English poetry” as “the product of either careerism, or keeping one’s hand in: a choice between vulgarity and banality.” David Watt’s book, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” attempts to uncover where along that spectrum we can place Hoccleve’s literary labor and its products as aesthetic and material propositions. Watt takes as his primary subject the process, not the product, of Hoccleve’s writing, and to that end interrogates its material remnants and the poetic fictions of its composition. Watt begins his book with a bold observation: “This is not the book I initially planned to write. The version of this book that I had in my head was never the version on the page in front of me” (1). Such a statement is honest, and draws attention to the chasms between intentionality and execution that are at the heart of all creative and critical endeavors. At the same time, Watt implies that the book escaped his control in some way. Though he thus sets up a parallel for his arguments about the complexities of Hoccleve’s compositional difficulties, it is a disturbing beginning. His frank honesty about the potential failures of process suggest that the product, too, may be problematic. The book offers a sustained engagement with the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, and though many of its points are locally persuasive, it does not quite succeed in offering a critical framework that can make compelling sense of the gap between anticipation and execution it perceives in Hoccleve’s poetry. More successful is Watt’s attempt to focus on both the ephemeralities and the materialities of the poetic process. As Watt argues in the book’s introduction, “the Series offers a reflection on, not a reflection of, his [Hoccleve’s] conception of book production” (4). To this end, Watt marshals paleographical evidence along with careful close readings of the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, a sequence of five distinct and interrelated Middle English poems, the best known of which are the first two, the “Complaint” and “Dialogue.” “Learn to Die” has occasioned some more recent criticism, but the remaining two poems, “The Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife” and “The Tale of Jonathas,” have warranted little critical attention over many years. A book-length study of Hoccleve’s Series is a welcome contribution to the field. Watt is to be commended for his sustained focus on Hoccleve’s complexly allusive poetry, and his careful encounter with the manuscript instantiations of that verse. The three autograph manuscripts of Hoccleve’s poetry (or possibly four, as Linne Mooney has recently argued in these pages) have been [End Page 348] disproportionately subject to the kind of paleographically and codico-logically grounded literary criticism that Watt assays. The first chapter of The Making attempts to construct Hoccleve’s likely audience “in and for the Series” through the lens of San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111. Watt reads the claims of Hoccleve’s narrator persona “Thomas” as reflecting and responding to the issues faced by Hoccleve and his poetry, and its reception by a coterie readership among the clerks of the Privy Seal. Watt argues Hoccleve’s poems “are meant to circulate among those at work in the Privy Seal and elsewhere in Westminster Hall” (31). That “elsewhere” ultimately covers quite a bit of ground, deriving from Ethan Knapp’s exposition of Hoccleve’s bureaucratic vision and Emily Steiner’s Langlandian documentary imagination, and stretching back to the coterie audiences of Piers Plowman described by Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and others. Watt asserts an imagined audience ranging from the king, to the upper echelons of the nobility, to Hoccleve’s fellow clerks. His depiction of a stratified and plural audience for the Series, its multiple valences carefully crafted...

A Companion to fifteenth-century English poetry

This collection of seventeen original essays by leading authorities offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the significant authors and important aspects of fifteenth-century English poetry. The major poets of the century, John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, receive detailed analysis, alongside perhaps lesser-known authors: John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenham, Peter Idley, George Ashby and John Audelay. In addition, several essays examine genres and topics, including romance, popular, historical and scientific poetry, and translations from the classics. Other chapters investigate the crucial contexts for approaching poetry of this period: manuscript circulation, patronage and the influence of Chaucer.

The Rehabilitation of Patronage in Hoccleve’s Series

This article argues that, in the Series , Thomas Hoccleve not only appeals to the system of patronage, but attempts to revise it, creating a new template for literary sponsorship and engagement based on collaboration and mutual responsibility. The process of literary production Hoccleve outlines supports a reading of patronage that is not exclusively financially-based; rather, it is flexible, less hierarchical, and demands more from the patron than Hoccleve’s previous work—and indeed the work of most medieval authors—would suggest. In order to understand Hoccleve’s attempts to redefine his relationship to the system of literary sponsorship, however, we must be willing to take the structure of the Series seriously, following the signposts of creative collaboration Hoccleve weaves throughout the texts rather than their misleading, seemingly random nature. In addition to offering an alternate reading of Hoccleve’s work in the Series , this article suggests new ways of thinking about literary patronage in the Middle Ages more generally.

Thomas Hoccleve's Particular Appeal

This article describes a single class devoted to an experiment in practical criticism. The experiment encourages students to recognize their own capacity as close readers when interpreting an unfamiliar fifteenth-century poem by Thomas Hoccleve. It also encourages students to reflect critically on the practice of criticism, especially the way it determines the standard by which we judge poetry.

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

'Her Heed They Caste Awry': The Transmission and Reception of Thomas Hoccleve's Personal Poetry

Whereas most critics of Thomas Hoccleve's poetry have focused on elucidating the author's particular mode of self-presentation, this essay sets out to demonstrate that few fifteenth-century readers beyond the poet's initial addressees enjoyed his artful self-portraiture per se. Until now, Hoccleve Studies have been dominated by the texts preserved in the autograph manuscripts produced by the poet towards the end of his life. When we turn to the non-autograph traditions of his works, however, it becomes clear that Hoccleve's poems were preserved in a variety of forms and contexts and that medieval readers' experiences of these texts must have been considerably more varied than has typically been allowed. While Hoccleve's own exemplification of the link between self-fashioning and book production in the Series may have provided an important stimulus for the selective reception of this work, I explore the possibility that the highly unusual nature of the poet's most personal texts led to their sidelining in the reproduction of his corpus. Accordingly, I suggest, consideration of the fifteenth-century transmission and reception of Hoccleve's personal poetry can illuminate not only the often deeply self-serving nature of reading and textual reproduction in late medieval England; it can also provide a fresh indication of the extent to which some of Hoccleve's texts depart from the norms of the literary and codicological cultures in which their author participates.

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Penitential Discourse in Hoccleve’s Series

Penitential Discourse in Hoccleve’s Series Robyn Malo Had I be for an homicide iknowe Or an extorcioner or a robbour, Or for a coin clipper as wide yblowe As was my seeknesse, or a werriour Aᵹein þe feith, or a false maintenour Of causes, þouᵹ I had amendid me, Hem to han mynged had ben nicete. . . . But this is al another caas, sothly. This was the strook of God; he ᵹaf me þis. . . . In feith, frende, make I thenke an open shrifte, And hide not what I had of his ᵹifte.1 In this passage from Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, the narrator makes several important claims: he has not committed a serious crime or sin; God was the root cause of his illness; he should not, therefore, hesitate to advertise—to confess—his recovery as widely as possible. In explaining his situation, Hoccleve refuses to identify himself as a sinner in absolute terms.2 Instead, he redefines confession: the rhymes “shrifte” [End Page 277] and “ᵹifte” suggest the possibility that confession—shrift—might comprise an explanation of what God sends, rather than a laundry list of transgressions. The entirety of the Series, in fact, supplies us with a complex response to and engagement with late medieval confessional discourse, which Hoccleve neither embraces nor rejects. He rejects, instead, the idea that confession enables the expression of the self only in terms of sin. In the Complaint and Dialogue, the narrator’s primary concern is not with examining or justifying his behavior, but rather with what he is: “Uppon a look is harde men hem to grounde / What a man is. Therby the sothe is hid” (C 211–12; my emphasis). That shrift facilitates the expression of God’s grace and individual identity inverts the widely accepted idea that the medieval “sinner recognizes himself not by what he is but by what he has done.”3 Hoccleve’s narrator, rather than rejecting confessional discourse outright, wishes to recognize himself for and confess what he is. It will be the argument of this essay that in the Series, Thomas Hoccleve appropriates penitential discourse to argue for the narrator’s sanity and sinlessness—and that this confessional project dovetails with the narrator’s desire to protest his innocence.4 A group of five poems composed between 1419 and 1422,5 the Series consists of the Complaint, in which the narrator laments that in spite of his recovery from mental illness, his friends reject him; the Dialogue, which dramatizes a conversation between the narrator and a friend, centering on whether to circulate [End Page 278] the Complaint; the Tale of Jereslaus’ Wife, a translation of a narrative and moralization from the Gesta Romanorum; Learn to Die, a translation of Henry Suso’s Ars moriendi in the Horologium sapientiae (c. 1334);6 and the translation of another tale and moralization from the Gesta, entitled Jonathas and Fellicula.7 This poem has been regarded both as a “loose anthology”8 and as a more unified whole;9 but there has yet to be a sustained discussion of how elements of the confessional form pervade and link the Series. Hoccleve’s use of penitential language demonstrates both the unity of this poetic work and its dogged commitment to self-expression.10 Confessional motifs not only unite the poems of the Series—they also reveal the work to be organized around the narrator’s [End Page 279] impulse to communicate his inner self to a wide audience. It is simply not the case that Hoccleve “bows to the demands of his accuser,”11 abandoning his original intention to circulate a written defense of his sanity. Instead, in deploying elements of the confessional form throughout the poem, Hoccleve yokes together the tales from the Gesta with the Complaint, Dialogue, and Learn to Die, revealing the poem as a whole to explore not only the problem of identity—a topic many have taken up with respect to the Complaint and Dialogue, but seldom the rest of the Series12—but also to suggest the difficulties with some conventions of mainstream penitential discourse. Forms of confession were hugely popular in late medieval Europe, particularly in fifteenth-century England, where...

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

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

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (review)

Reviewed by: Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse J. Michael Colvin Karen Elaine Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company 2011) x + 187 pp. Karen Smyth’s brilliant though frustrating new book explores the various conceptions of time evident in the poetry of John Lydgate of Bury and Thomas Hoccleve. Divided into six chapters, Smyth’s book first erects an “empirical-based [sic] morphology” to investigate the multiple and situational methods of reckoning and communicating time available to these two poets (5). Smyth takes Aron Gurevich’s understanding of time as a socially- and culturally-constructed quantity (akin to space, gender, etc.), and seeks to explicate the various means by which medieval thinkers experienced, managed, rationalized, and explained time. Smyth begins her book with a relatively simple premise: that the dominant modern discourse of time—as a linear progression of discrete, yet causally-related, concatenated episodes—was but one of many strategies of time-consciousness available to late-medieval thinkers. Cyclical time (i.e., seasonal, diurnal, etc.) and typological time (i.e., salvific, Providential, etc.) existed alongside linear time, and medieval thinkers employed various conceptions of time in a situational manner: different time-reckoning strategies did and meant different things. Time was equally “quantitative” and “qualitative,” both dependently and autonomously significant. Smyth reminds us that “texts use different discourses of horizontal, vertical, cyclical, spiral, linear, thematic, synchronic times, and ... there are many variations on these models, deeply rooted in the cultural specificities of period and place” (16). As histories of time-consciousness have tended to be largely technologically or linguistically deterministic, Smyth locates her intervention as a cultural approach to the question. Smyth’s first chapter, entitled “Cultural Narratives of Time,” is her most compelling. A cultural narrative, per Smyth’s formulation, suggests a “vernacularity” (5) of “the conceptual categories” (6) devised to measure, manage, explain, and mark time; these narratives are the products of negotiation. She organizes this chapter into eight parts, each of which forms an intervention into a larger methodological argument about time itself. Smyth first “explores the idea that new terms in the vernacular for expressing time reckonings and duration of time were devised in tandem with technological developments” (15). Precision of time-reckoning, argues Smyth, led to novel ways of expressing the existence and passage of time; these new methods and expressions fall into a general category of “mechanization,” which Smyth believes encompasses the advent of time-terminologies and the indices by which they are measured. Smyth then examines the increasing awareness of measured time—and the tools employed to measure it—resulting in a historical consciousness of “living ‘within timeness’” (20–21). Smyth’s third subsection details the multiple coexistent temporal conceptions marked by various schemata and reckoning devices, including “religious feasts, mechanical hours, seasonal referents, astronomical calculations, subjective feelings and by ages of the world” (21). These [End Page 284] expressions were “context-dependent” and rhetorically significant to their circumstance. Smyth later details methods of time-regulation (30–33) and their manifestation in literature (33–51), respectively. Finally, section eight explicates the ambiguities of time-representation in late-medieval English literature, concluding that Smyth’s authors were well aware of the dynamic, sophisticated, and varied temporal consciousness available to their conceptual palate (56); authors were able to manipulate their expressions of time-consciousness by means of imagining and visualizing time in accordance with their ideological programs (57–58). The remainder of Smyth’s monograph applies this analytical morphology to two exemplary case studies: chapters 2 through 4 explicate the various imaginings of time in Lydgate’s verse, and chapters 5 and 6 focus on Hoccleve’s works. Chapter 2 discusses Lydgate’s deployment of time-sensitive language by locating his Troy Book in a historical moment, concluding that the author “demonstrates an artistic awareness of temporal ploys within narrative structures” that “create[s] a discursive web of coexisting causal and disjunctive attitudes toward time” (78). Chapter 3 examines Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes and concludes that the author’s use of comparatives emphasizes “the context-dependent nature of [time] expressions; the coexistence of the objective and subjective [time-referents]; episodic and causal...