Thomas Hoccleve Research Articles

Reading misreadings in Thomas Hoccleve's series

“Tales about time” is how A. A. Mendilow classifies some modern novels, but it is also a term that aptly describes the narrative frame of Thomas Hoccleve's fifteenth-century poem commonly known as ...

Paths of Long Study: Reading Chaucer and Christine de Pizan in Tandem

‘‘Paths of Long Study’’: Reading Chaucer and Christine de Pizan in Tandem Theresa Coletti University of Maryland Consider the following. Thomas Hoccleve translated Christine de Pizan’s L’Epistre au dieu d’Amours into Middle English as the Letter of Cupid, a poem that invoked Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary authority and circulated alongside his courtly writings in important fifteenthcentury anthologies such as Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16 and Tanner 346. Despite its clear debt to Christine’s poem, Hoccleve’s Letter found its way into the Chaucer apocrypha and subsequently appeared in Renaissance editions of the poet’s collected works.1 The triangulation of texts and writers illustrated by the case of the Epistre and the Letter of Cupid instances a pattern that elsewhere marks the relationship of ChauEarlier versions of this essay were presented at the Biennial Conference of the New Chaucer Society, University of Colorada, Boulder; the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland; the University of Pennsylvania; and the University of Michigan. I am grateful to my interlocutors at all these venues for their helpful commentary. I also want to thank Anne Coldiron, Richard Emmerson, Lynn Staley, and Sarah Stanbury for their suggestions and encouragement and Frank Grady for astute editorial advice. 1 For editions of the two poems, see Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. and trans. Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990). An early discussion by J. A. Burrow treats Hoccleve’s Letter solely in terms of homage to Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women, but a more recent analysis corrects the prior neglect of Hoccleve’s source text. See ‘‘Hoccleve and Chaucer,’’ in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 54–55; and ‘‘Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets,’’ in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 36. For detailed considerations of this triangle of authors, see Roger Ellis, ‘‘Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Hoccleve: The Letter of Cupid,’’ in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 29–54; and Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 45–75. PAGE 1 1 ................. 16094$ $CH1 11-01-10 14:03:24 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER cer and Christine de Pizan in late medieval England. Two important texts of the Chaucer apocrypha, the anonymous Assembly of Ladies and The Flower and the Leaf, exhibit thematic and narrative features that point to the influence of Christine de Pizan’s Dit de la Rose and Livre de la Cité des Dames.2 A shared commitment to promoting the good wife’s prudent counsel produces complex textual connections between Chaucer ’s Tale of Melibee, Philippe de Mézières’s Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, and Christine’s Livre des Trois Vertus.3 In 1526 Richard Pynson decisively linked the woman writer and the English laureate: his edition of The Boke of Fame, made by Geffray Chaucer: with Dyuers other of his Workes included in that diversity Anthony Woodville’s fifteenthcentury translation of Christine de Pizan’s Proverbes moraulx. The texts and careers of Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan crisscross each other with dizzying complexity. Although the woman writer holds a place in the reigning critical narrative of Chaucer’s relationships to his literary influences and his contemporaries, she has yet to lay claim to the prominent position in it that is warranted, I contend, by her extensive rhetorical, historical, and cultural affiliations with the English poet.4 This essay sketches a provisional map of those affiliations. 2 Jane Chance, ‘‘Christine de Pizan as Literary Mother: Woman’s Authority and Subjectivity in ‘The Floure and the Leafe’ and ‘The Assembly of Ladies,’’’ in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmerman and Dina De Rentiis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 245–59. 3 See Carolyn P. Collette, ‘‘Chaucer and the French Tradition Revisited: Philippe de Mézières and the Good...

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England. Ethan Knapp

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England. Ethan Knapp

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England. Ethan Knapp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Pp. x+210.

<i>The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England</i>. Ethan Knapp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Pp. x+210.

The Language of the Chaucer Tradition by Simon Horobin

REVIEWS one of the book’s strengths is its depth of historical/cultural research. Her methodology is extensive and connective to the point of headiness, informed by Foucault and psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and gender theories . Her methodology resists the literary encapsulation of an organized reading, chosing rather to disperse the text as she constellates its historical and cultural indexes. One of Heng’s most suggestive claims concerns medieval concepts of race, which she extrapolates from a reading of The King of Tars, and which she sees as a concept with cultural power in its own right. It is not simply a secondary function of religion; she argues that it deploys morally valenced physical attributes based in whiteness and blackness, but it also demonstrates lability and cultural performativity across different contexts. Geraldine Heng’s study of romance mingles conceptual acrobatics and deep research: fearless and provocative, a gestural display in an area of medieval studies that tends to the minute and insular. Whether or not you agree with her methodology or are convinced by all of her arguments , Heng’s scholarship and sweep are admirable. This is a must-read for scholars interested in new ways of thinking about the diversity and cultural reach of medieval romance. Christine Chism Rutgers University Simon Horobin. The Language of the Chaucer Tradition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003. Pp. vi, 179. $75.00. Simon Horobin’s study of the language of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales is characterized principally by its deliberate diminution of the part played by Chancery in standardizing English at the beginning of the fifteenth century. He follows M. L. Samuels’s 1963 identification of four written standards that distinguish between the language of Chaucer and other literary manuscripts (Type III) and government and commercial documents (Type IV), which after 1430 Samuels calls ‘‘Chancery Standard.’’ Horobin’s treatment is deliberate because the books and articles in which I have advanced the influence of Chancery are cited in his bibliography but never referred to in his text. Anent bibliography, it may be noted that the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (LALME). PAGE 321 321 ................. 11491$ CH13 11-01-10 14:02:35 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER to which Horobin frequently refers, is not included in his bibliography or in any note that provides bibliographical information. It is edited in four volumes by Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin (Aberdeen University Press, 1986). The problem with Samuels’s classification is that we know that at least one of the scribes that he and Horobin included in Class III, Thomas Hoccleve, was, like Chaucer himself, a government clerk. It is hard to believe that the other scribes who wrote literary manuscripts were not also writers of government and business documents. The few manuscripts that Horobin chooses to focus on would not have been enough to support a scribe. Literary scribes must have done commercial work as well and, if so, the dozen or so words on which Samuels and Horobin base their distinction of Types III and IV are less convincing. Henry IV and especially Henry V shifted Chancery and Privy Seal from Latin and French toward English. The stationers and guilds followed suite, and a tradition of writing in English, both commercial and literary , came into being. Assisted by the continuing progress of P. M. W. Robinson’s Canterbury Tales Project, which is producing computer transcripts of all the Chaucer manuscripts, looking forward to computer collation to produce a history of the texts, Horobin has made exhaustive counts of the spellings and grammatical forms of some twelve to fifteen words, especially in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts. On pages 74–75, where he lists the presence or absence of Type IV (Chancery) forms of five words in Chaucer manuscripts between 1400 and 1500, Horobin concludes that chronology was the most significant factor in determining the presence of Type IV forms. Actually, it was the growing influence of Chancery models and training that helped to regularize writing. The forms that Horobin has cited with reasonable accuracy should be viewed against the background of Chancery practice. At the end of Fisher and Richardson’s An Anthology of Chancery English, which...

Ethan Knapp: The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England.

Ethan Knapp: The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England.

Review: The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

Review: The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

Review: Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts

Review: Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts

Review: The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

Review: The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

Medieval narratives of accused queens

This study of medieval stories of accused queens - noble and hapless victims whose suffering becomes a metaphor of larger social injustice - identifies the two principal types of this fictional narrative and explores their popularity from the 13th to the 15th century. Offering evidence of lively debate in the Middle Ages about the nature of women, the volume considers such topics as the perpetual lustiness of men, the powerlessness of women, the nature of good women, slander as evidence of legal failure, the purifying value of affliction, and economic discrepancies between the rich and the poor. Nancy Black characterizes each type of narrative as a four-part structure in which the virtuous heroine falls twice from a position of high status and then twice recovers that status. Focusing chiefly on non-Chaucerian texts, Black examines influential or representative tales by Gautier de Coinci, Philippe de Remi, Jehan Maillart, Jehan Wauquelin, Nicholas Trevet, John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, two plays from the Miracles de Nostre Dame Par Personnages, and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. Integrating her analysis with illustrations and related contemporary texts, she places each story within the living community that produced, read and listened to the stories. Because relatively few medieval stories feature female protagonists, these tales stand out for presenting a positive image of women who were active in the world rather than cloistered in a convent. The narratives do more than model feminine behaviour for dutiful wives - they advance the notion that adherence to a religious moral code is more important than blind obedience to patriarchal customs. Their analysis should help the reader to understand the complicated interactions in the Middle Ages between gendered stereotypes and depictions of holiness.

Middle English literature: an historical sourcebook

List of Literary Works and Related Topics. Table of Dates, 1325-1500. List of Plates. Acknowledgements. Map. Introduction. 1. Conventions And Institutions. Benedictine Rule. Friars. Humors. Marriage. Pilgrimage. Prioresses. 2 Force And Order. Battle of Agincourt. The English and England. Lollardy Trials. Usurpation. 3 Gender, Sexuality, And Difference. Amazons. Chastity, Marriage, Widowhood, And Virginity. The Far East. God's Unknowability. Lechers And Sodomites. Saracens. Women: Margaret Paston. 4 Images. Lovell Lectionary. Anne Of Burgundy, Duchess Of Bedford, Before St. Anne. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Ellesmere). Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Hengwrt). Chaucer Portrait: Thomas Hoccleve, Regiment Of Princes. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Court Of King's Bench. Miracle Of The Boy Singer. New College, Oxford University. Revolt: Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Richard Ii Presented To The Virgin And Christ. Royal Benefactors. 5 Labor And Capital. Guilds. Ordinance And Statute Of Laborers. Pestilence. The Revolt. 6 Style And Spectacle. Feasts. The Hunt. Pageants. Processions. Sumptuary. Tournaments. 7 Textualities. Audience Reactions To Sermons. Books. Censorship. Enarratio (Analysis And Exposition Of Texts). The English Language. Plays and Representations. Appendix: Currency, Income, Prices Measures. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

Review: The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

1St Anne's College Oxford The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England Ethan Knapp x + 210 University Park, Pa. Penn State University Press 2001 $40

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England by Ethan Knapp

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER late-medieval importance of the vernacular, in the largest sense of the term. The presentation of this edited material varies in its usefulness: Schaap’s list provides a practical bridge between the annotations in one manuscript and a critical edition of Piers Plowman. Jönsson and Voaden present their two texts in a convenient juxtaposition, even though the Middle English is not a translation of the Latin; one of the benefits of such an alignment, in fact, is to highlight gaps and omissions. But the editors’ choice to include the Middle English manuscript line numbers in the body of the text is less helpful, since the parenthetical numbers interfere significantly with the experience of reading. Kerby-Fulton and Hodie record the same important information about manuscript layout in a more friendly form. I found the archaeological work of transcription and editing the most constructive aspect of The Medieval Reader, in part because I found the organization of essays into cases of ‘‘professional reading’’ and ‘‘vernacular reading’’ unsatisfying. Nevertheless, the strengths of this collection lie in its particularities, and the varieties of inquiry included here do provide a number of useful perspectives on late-medieval manuscript studies. Jessica Brantley Yale University Ethan Knapp. The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Pp. x, 210. $40.00. The central contention of Ethan Knapp’s monograph is that, in addition to perceiving ‘‘Lollardy and the Lancastrians’’ as the shaping forces of early fifteenth-century writing, we should add a third term, ‘‘bureaucracy .’’ Whereas we have come to think of literary and bureaucratic discourse as wholly distinct if not inimical to each other, in fact the relation of these two kinds of writing bears closer inspection. The fifteenth century witnessed three key developments: the continued separation of the principal bureaucratic offices from the king’s household; the adoption of English as an official language of state; and the growing laicization of the staff of the central writing offices. Knapp situates Hoc396 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:12 PS REVIEWS cleve within these developments, and argues for his importance ‘‘not as an eccentric but as a representative of a significant alternative to the aureate predecessors confirmed as a lineage’’ by later critics (p. 12). This is a promising opening gambit; the Hoccleve of this book is indeed enmeshed in fundamentally bureaucratic culture. While Hoccleve does not emerge as exactly ‘‘eccentric,’’ Knapp’s book consistently does present him as a difficult and peculiar poet, balanced on representational knife-edges. He is more the companion of, say, Langland or Margery Kempe than he is of urbane Chaucer. Recent studies have focussed on Hoccleve as public poet (for instance, Paul Strohm’s England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 [1998], or Nicholas Perkins’ Hoccleve’s ‘‘Regiment of Princes’’: Counsel and Constraint [2001]). Despite the inevitably public orientation of bureaucracy, the Hoccleve of this book is, by contrast, an agonized and private figure, seeking, yet never achieving, a relation of protective and abiding presence with the powerful. The focus remains consistently on Hoccleve’s works. The title is a little misleading, since ‘‘the literature of late medieval England’’ doesn’t get a look in. On the contrary, Knapp takes any postHocclevian poets out of the picture by arguing that Hoccleve has ‘‘no progeny’’ (p. 11). This is a missed opportunity to consider that other intensely bureaucratic fifteenth-century poet, George Ashby, whose Prisoner’s Reflections open with a very clear reference to the opening of Hoccleve’s Series. Chapter 1 establishes the frame of the argument with the examples of Hoccleve’s own book of bureaucratic models, the Formulary, and ‘‘La Male Regle.’’ Hoccleve’s bureaucratic position was liminal, poised as it was between the status of scribe and that of gentleman, between a gift and a wage economy, between membership in the king’s household and a state bureaucracy. Scrutiny of both the Formulary and the petitionary text reveals a Hoccleve whose autobiographical particularity emerges from that liminality; it emerges only out of its obverse, bureaucratic anonymity: ‘‘The language of bureaucracy and that of...

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (review)

Reviews 239 Parergon 20.1 (2003) frame, its strength lies in various individual essays, in particular those of Dickinson and Sharpe, Rabin, Marland, Quinn, Andrews and Ward, which do indeed provide insightful studies of aspects of this interesting area of social history. Deborah Williams Faculty of Law/School of Humanities The University of Western Australia Knapp, Ethan, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001; cloth; pp. x, 210; RRP US$40.00; ISBN 0271021357. ‘It is, indeed, hard to image a form of literary history that would not be genealogical... In the assumed parthenogenesis of this tradition, the metaphor of paternity, the relation of fathers and sons, has always been central’ (p. 107). The same might be said of an author study that avoids the assumption of literariness and yet this is, precisely, Ethan Knapp’s intelligent and provocative strategem for reading Thomas Hoccleve’s literary works. Hoccleve’s career as a bureaucrat – a clerk – is central to, not excluded from, his production as a poetical writer. Knapp organises his study into six chapters that treat, in turn, Hoccleve’s major output. The Formulary is read both as autobiography and ‘an easily referenced collection of model documents’ (p. 31), and ‘La Male Regle’ (1405) because it ‘substantiates [the] links between bureaucratic practices and the construction of autobiography in Hoccleve’s verse’ (p. 36-7). His translation of Christine de Pisan’s L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours, known as the Letter of Cupid (1402), deploys Christine’s ‘radical critique of the prevailing connections between gender and authority’ (p. 50) but cannot replicate her authority of experience. Hoccleve’s problem is structurally, rather than ontologically, similar to hers. Hoccleve is one of the emergent lay class of clerics; furthermore, he is married; thus, ‘Hoccleve was not situated to speak for the established cultural traditions of either courtly verse [chevalerie] or clerkly didacticism [clergie]’ (p. 71). Knapp’s reading of the Regement of Princes (1410-1412) thematises two aspects of Hoccleve’s preoccupation with autobiography, or his use of textuality to represent selfhood. The poem is ‘a generic hybrid’: the first part (prologue) is ‘one of Hoccleve’s most typical compositions, the begging poem’ while the second section, ‘the Regement proper … constitutes the first example found in 240 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) English of that most popular of medieval genres, the mirror of princes’ (p. 81). Knapp first positions the Regement alongside John Carpenter’s Liber Albus (1419) to find ‘a vision of writing as a supplement to the fragile human body’ (p. 85). For Carpenter, no less than Hoccleve, ‘the bureaucratic technologies of writing’ offer, at once, a diagnostic occasion to lament the physical and mental costs of writing – ‘My bak unbuxum,’ ‘Stommak … whom stowpynge out of dreede/Annoyeth sore;’ ‘oure yen/ Upon the whyte mochil sorwe dryen,’ the imperative to ‘knytte/… Mynde, ye, and hand’ – and – ‘the promise of a victory over time and age’ (p. 90-92). Knapp argues that Hoccleve uses this promise to reject the Boethian consolations traditionally invoked in such a context. Instead, ‘Hoccleve chooses to represent himself as having found consolation not in philosophy but in the impossible home of textuality’ (p. 106). This conclusion is at some distance from the ‘auspicious opportunity for the development of serious English propagandistic verse’ (p. 81) which, Knapp acknowledges, is the way literary history has usually read the Regement. Knapp’s position here is not to gainsay such a judgement but, more shrewdly, to suspend such readings by first attending to the Regement’s ‘traces of the Privy Seal’ (p. 83); thus the prologue is an integral – and compelling – part of the work rather than a distraction. Knapp is, I think, less persuasive in dealing with a second theme in the Regement which he considers in a chapter titled ‘Eulogies and Usurpations: Father Chaucer in the Regement of Princes’. While the argument makes the wellestablished New Historical move of reading the circulation of a textual trope in the trajectory of historical events – the antagonistic relation between Henrys IV and V provides a model for Hoccleve’s relation to Chaucer – this same move loosens Knapp...

Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint

What is the relation between Marian lament and the distinctively modern, autobiographical complaints of Thomas Hoccleve? What, moreover, is the relation between Hoccleve's performances of private misery and his ability to offer advice and counsel to princes? This article argues that Hoccleve's “Complaint of the Virgin” can teach us to recognize the complex interweaving of gender, genre, ideality, and excess that informs Hocclevean complaints more generally. “The Complaint of the Virgin” explores a woman's exemplary transition from subversive investment in private connection and private suffering to self-abnegation and participation in public power. In doing so, the poem provides a model for Hoccleve's own movements between marginalized interiority and public rhetoric—and for his meditation between Lancastrian subjects and their sovereign. The Virgin offers a lesson in the 1364 Abstracts [PMLA pleasures and power of complaint, the disciplining of interiority, and the production of social relations through spectacle and sacrifice.

Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition

Thomas Hoccleve worked the hardest to install Geoffrey Chaucer as the Father of English Poetry and to claim his own position as direct lineal heir in this literary genealogy. Chaucer's paternal title was not articulated in exactly these words until John Dryden's famous assessment in the Preface to the Fables (1700)—"he is the Father of English Poetry." 1 But the notion of a patrilineal inheritance was already formulated within a generation of the poet's death in 1400 when Hoccleve sought to place himself in this family tree of immediate literary descendants in his famous commendation from The Regiment of Princes:

Review: Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue

Review: Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue

Shifting Focus to Mozart's Operas

Grassnick, Ulrike. Ratgeber des Konigs: Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England. Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 2004. Pp. xii; 471. Ulrike Grassnick's book bears the subtitle Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England, which accurately describes the contents of the volume. author studies seven Mirrors of Princes in Middle English: John Trevisa's Governance of Kings and Princes (c. 1388-92), Thomas Hoccleve's TheEegiment of Princes (c. 1410-11), John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh's Secrees qfoldPhilisqffres (1449-50), Sir Gilbert Hay's Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (c.1456), George Ashby's Active Policy of a Prince (1470), John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Book VlI - 1386-93), and Geoffrey Chaucer's Tale ofMelibee (c. 13 72-74). All of these texts were produced between the 1370s and the 1470s (none are extant from the 1200s), and in their form the first five are pragmatic texts, while the last two are narrative-fictional. Interestingly, according to Grassnick, Chaucer's Tak ofMelibee, one of the narrative-fictional texts, is the earliest Furstenspiegel in English. Thus, Chaucer not only wrote the earliest manual on the use of a scientific instrument in English, The Treatise on the Astrolabe, but also the first Mirror of Princes in the vernacular. As G. points out, Tale qfMelibee is one of only two prose elements in the Canterbury Tales (along with Parson's Tale), and it is the one that the poet assigns to his own fictional alter ego, Chaucer-thePUgrim. G. gives special attention to narrative-fictional texts, so that her book is informative and thought provoking not only for students of political science but of literature and history as well. In her fifty-page introduction, G. defines the primary goal of the Furstenspiegel to be the creation of behavioral patterns proper to leadership (32), a function quite different from the mirroring of existing behavior that the word Furstenspiegel seems to imply. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu in English, she writes: Symbolic power is a power to construct reality (29) ; in fact, G. identifies her methodological position as borrowed from Bourdieu's Handlungstheorie (Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns [Frankfurt a. M.: 1998]) and acknowledges her use of his central concepts of Feld, Kapital, Sozialer Raum, and Habitus [pattern of behavior - 18]. In her Literaturverzeichnis [Works Cited], sixteen entries are by Bourdieu. Within the political and literary fields of the Middle Ages, therefore, G. recognizes that the image of an ideal leader may be as much a construction of the texts as a critique of any prevailing system or specific leader. Her second chapter provides a brief history of the medieval Furstenspiegel During the Middle Ages theorists generally drew their models of kingship from Old and New Testament traditions rather than from those of classical antiquity, although the Secretum Secretorum [Secret of Secrets], the Letter to Alexander the Great by the Pseudo- Aristotle, was very influential and often translated. It was St. Augustine who interpreted the Bible as the first mirror, and that interpretation prevailed as other texts became secondary mirrors of archetypal and exemplary models of behavior. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Furstenspiegel followed this Augustinian textual tradition in the construction of ideal leader images. Grassnick's third chapter contains a separate section on each of the seven Furstenspiegel that her book treats. order of her discussion is not strictly chronological: the narrative-fictional texts (Gower's and Chaucer's) are grouped last because they offer the expanded possibilities of meaning that fiction permits. …

The Regiment of Princes. Thomas Hoccleve, Charles R. Blyth

<i>The Regiment of Princes</i>. Thomas Hoccleve, Charles R. Blyth