Thomas Hoccleve

This volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right.

Thomas Hoccleve's Series, written c.1420 was edited for EETS in 1892. This is a new edition of the first two sections and glosses the poems more fully than before. The introduction presents new findings about Hoccleve, whose poems have attracted much attention in recent years.

Written around 1411, Thomas Hoccleve's poem The Regiment commented on the deposition of Richard II and the subsequent attempts by the Lancastrian crown to assert its authority and legitimacy.

Features the full text of a poem entitled "Lament for Chaucer," written by English poet Thomas Hoccleve (1368-c. 1450) from the "Oxford Book of English Verse 1900" and provided online by Bibliomania.com Ltd.

This book explores the work of the late-medieval English writer Thomas Hoccleve. It highlights Hoccleve's role, throughout his works, as a religious writer: an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels. It suggests a role for Hoccleve as a poetic mediator, capable of mediating between the increasingly militant English church and an incipient English literary tradition, and it highlights Hoccleve's role in transforming the figure of Chaucer in the first decades of the fifteenth century. It argues that the version of Chaucer presented in Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes - august, devout, and conspicuously religious - is not a pre-formed artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention; and it indicates the ecclesiastical, political, and literary contexts that make this version of Chaucer both possible and necessary. This study also situates Hoccleve's accomplishments in a transnational poetic context - offering French and Italian precedents for Hoccleve's moralization of Chaucer, while examining the influence of contemporary French poetry on Hoccleve's work. It positions us to reconsider Hoccleve's role within English literary tradition, and to better understand the way heresy and religious reform surface in late medieval poetry; and it affords us a more nuanced context for Chaucer's positioning as a literary 'father' figure in this period.

In this study of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, Perkins argues that despite the view of Hoccleve's politics and poetics as conventional, servile and naive, it is in fact deeply engaged in the political and literary currents of the early 15th century.

Thomas Hoccleve was born in 1367 and entered government service as clerk in the office of the Privy Seal in 1387, an office that he held until his death in 1426. His earliest datable poem (the Epistle of Cupid, a free translation of Christine de Pisan's Epistre au Dieu d'Amour) was completed about 1402. The Regiment of Princes, written about 1410-11, was composed at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II. Essentially it is addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance, but it exhibits considerable generic instability and thus raises fundamental questions about how we should understand the tone of considerable portions of the poem. For all the problems it presents, The Regiment shows that Hoccleve has strengths as a poet. At times he could be a very talented prosodist. In autobiographical sections of the poem he creates a most interesting early-modern subjectivity. He has distinctive observations to make about his time, and, in his self-critical awareness, probes the limits of what is means to be a poet writing in the wake of Chaucer.

Thomas Hoccleve's Series, written c.1420 was edited for EETS in 1892. This is a new edition of the first two sections and glosses the poems more fully than before. The introduction presents new findings about Hoccleve, whose poems have attracted much attention in recent years.