hocclevesociety

The first IHS Conference is less than a month away. “The Making of Thomas Hoccleve” will be held in Winnipeg from July 6-8, 2018, and we have a great program lined up. This conference is open to other members of the society as well. How do you join, you ask? One way to join is to attend the conference. There is no fee for the conference or the society. If you plan to attend, please click here to register by June 18 so that we can confirm our catering and transportation.

 

Program

Thomas Hoccleve has become increasingly prominent over the past twenty-five years, yet this conference is the first meeting dedicated solely to studying him since a conference in London in 1994. We are still finalizing some information on the program, which you can find here: http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/departments/humanities/4225.html.  If you would like to chair a session, please let us know.

Foreign Travel

If you are a citizen of Australia or the UK and entering the UK by plane (not land or sea, for some mysterious reason), you will need an ETA. If you do require an ETA please visit this website: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/visit/eta.asp. I believe the process is fairly quick, but please do this before departing for the airport. I believe that US citizens only require a passport. However, Rules and requirements can and do change with little warning, so we encourage you to consult this site even if you travel regularly: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/visit/visas.asp. If you are a citizen of another country, you may need to provide biometrics, please visit this website: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/visit/biometrics.asp to find out more. Finally, if you require a formal letter of invitation, please contact Paul Jenkins, who will be happy to supply one.

Accommodation and Travel within Winnipeg

Conference presenters will be staying at the Inn at the Forks. If you take a bus or a cab from the airport, it should take around 10-15 minutes by cab (recommended) to arrive. There are many other hotel options in Winnipeg, but please get in touch with David Watt or Paul Jenkins (email addresses below) if you would like some advice about particular hotels or if you would like to stay on campus.

Please note that the University of Manitoba is not downtown. We have therefore arranged transportation between the Inn at the Forks and the U of M campus. Please be ready to join us at 8:30 a.m. outside the Inn at the Forks if you would like a ride to the U of M campus each day of the conference, but please also make sure we know you are coming.

Food and Drink

We have arranged for refreshments and lunches at the conference that will be at no cost to participants.  We are also organizing a conference dinner on Saturday night. If you would like to attend that, please let us know.

The University of Manitoba

The U of M was founded in 1877, though some of its affiliated colleges are older. Its campuses are located on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis nation. We respect the Treaties that were made on these territories, we acknowledge the harms and mistakes of the past, and we dedicate ourselves to move forward in partnership with Indigenous communities in a spirit of reconciliation and collaboration.

Funding

This conference is generously funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Research Manitoba, the Arts Endowment fund, and the University of Manitoba Conference Sponsorship Program. It is also supported by several units at the University of Manitoba: the Institute for the Humanities; the Archives & Special Collections; the Faculty of Arts; the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media; Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal; the Department of Religion; the Department of History; and St John’s College.

Other Matters

Please note that the exchange rate is approximately $1 CAD to $ 0.75-80 USD at the moment. If you have any questions about any of the above, please contact David Watt (david.watt@umanitoba.ca). If you have any issues with the registration page, please get in touch with Paul Jenkins (umih@umanitoba.ca).

The Hoccleve society partnered with the Lydgate Society to sponsor a session this year. Thank you to Danielle Bradley for writing this excellent recap.

Hoccleve, Lydgate, and their Patrons (Session 172)

This year’s joint panel co-sponsored by the Hoccleve and Lydgate Societies explored the two poets within the context of one of the most powerful forces shaping late medieval poetry—patronage. The three panelists generally view Lydgate and Hoccleve taking control over their poetic content, catering to patrons while also subtly criticizing their influence and constructing alternative networks for the production and consumption of literature.

R. D. Perry’s “Naming Names: Creating an Audience in Hoccleve and Lydgate,” an extension of his piece soon to appear in Speculum, posits that these poets envisioned “coteries” comprised of significant potential patrons and other artists. Coteries function like a virtual creative space, inscribing proper poet-patron relations into the very form of a piece while harnessing the creative dynamism of a salon environment. Lydgate’s broader networks and prolificacy lent greater flexibility to his coteries, while Hoccleve necessarily played the role of the careful suppliant. Perry argues that both poets strategically name historic and contemporary writers to set the proper stage for their works, but that Hoccleve’s more intimate associations deserve attention for the great stock he set by proper names—especially that of Chaucer. Hoccleve also deploys silences strategically, for instance leaving Christine de Pizan unnamed in his “Letter of Cupid” as the composer of his source material; Perry believes this tacit nod to a well-known writer is meant to show Henry IV, who may have commissioned the piece, just how “in the know” Hoccleve was and how ideal he would be as an English version of Christine, writing for the Crown.

Leah Schwebel’s “Imperial and Literary Lineage in Lydgate’s Troy Book” also deals with poetic naming, and the significance of silences when a name goes conspicuously unuttered. Schwebel attempts to move beyond interpretive binaries that mark Lydgate as either antagonistic or sycophantic towards Chaucer, by showing that Lydgate engaged in complex naming strategies borrowed from Chaucer himself. She notes that Chaucer is both excessively present in and excessively absent from the Troy Book, and much like Chaucer “erases” his sources by declining to name them, Lydgate suggests Chaucer’s source Lollius for his Troy epic Troilus and Criseyde may be untrustworthy and thus launches into a discourse on Lydgate’s own status as truth-teller.

Mimi Ensley’s “Monuments, Memory, and Patronage in Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick” underscores the importance of poetry as a site of memory construction and dissemination in late medieval England. Lydgate curated the axe with which Guy drove the Danes from England into a religiously and militarily potent indicator of the prowess and importance of Guy’s heirs, Lydgate’s patron Margaret Talbot and the Beauchamp family. Much like a poet can immortalize and memorialize a family or political regime through a poetic genealogy, so Lydgate and his contemporaries might name their source material as an authorizing gesture.

It is clear, then, that patronage generated major opportunities as well as obstacles to Middle English poets, and while Hoccleve may have engaged in a similar balancing act as his contemporaries between assertiveness and silence, his greater precariousness impacted his formal poetic strategies. Our three panelists assert that patronage is a tool serving greater poetic ends, and as respondent Bobby Meyer-Lee pointed out, Hoccleve seems to be writing for “desired” rather than actual patrons, or even “invisible patrons” in the case of a poem like “Letter of Cupid” that may not have been officially commissioned. A vital avenue to pursue when studying these works is not simply how artists responded to patrons, but to each other, viewing other artists as audience members or even participants in the creative process who were all endeavoring to reveal themselves as heirs to a legitimate literary pedigree.

The International Hoccleve Society will host its first conference, “The Making of Thomas Hoccleve,” this summer. The aim of the society and of the conference is to map and inspire future directions of research into the making of Thomas Hoccleve by bringing together established and emerging scholars.  We are delighted that Amy Appleford (Boston), Vincent Gillespie (LMH, Oxford), and Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne) will share plenary talks and that Nicholas Watson will respond to the conference as a whole. The conference will take place during the weekend prior to the meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Toronto. This way, scholars from far afield will be able to attend both conferences on a single trip to Canada.

In our call for papers, the Society invited scholars to consider and address a range of questions about Thomas Hoccleve and his making. For example, how might we set his poetry, which is often celebrated for its idiosyncrasies and individuality, in broader frameworks? How might we re-examine its relationship to literary history?  Hoccleve’s closeness to Chaucer is well known but what other early influences, in English, French and Latin, shaped his writing?  Why do he and Lydgate, both writing for the same Lancastrian patrons, each studiously avoid reference to their rival?  Hoccleve is a key early-adopter of Chaucerian language, style, versification and metrical practice.  But Hoccleve also refuses much of Chaucer’s potential legacy (for example the genre of dream-vision, the mode of courtly allegory, narratives of cities of the pagan past such as Troy and Thebes) when Lydgate does not.  Where do those refusals leave Hoccleve in relation to English poetic history and what motivates them?  Did he influence Middle Scots makers, alongside the works of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate?  What happens to the Lancastrian Regiment of Princes, a popular text surviving in whole or part in nearly fifty manuscripts, during the rule of the House of York?  What can this substantial corpus of manuscripts tell us about the reading of poetry and of political advice in the fifteenth century?

Hoccleve played an active role in the making of his own books as well as the translation of a range of texts drawn from several languages and traditions. Is Charles R. Blyth right that Hoccleve was not ‘widely read’, when his source-texts can be diverse and surprising?  Where and in what forms did Hoccleve encounter these source texts?  What linguistic theories and intentions underpin his translations of orthodox religious writing (especially given the context of Arundel’s Constitutions)?  And what about the diverse audiences for Hoccleve’s own poetry?  Hoccleve wrote not only for fellow civil servants but also for London citizens and members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Some works might serve the antifeminist world of ‘London club culture’ (as Derek Pearsall has named it), but other works respond to the interests and reading habits of noblewomen, while Nancy Bradley Warren has put the Regiment in the hands of female monastics in the early sixteenth century. How can Hoccleve studies take account of such diversity while offering a coherent account of this author?  How might new approaches inform our understanding of Hoccleve in this context?

Hoccleve inhabits a middle position between ‘clerical’ and ‘lay’ literary and intellectual cultures, a middle position also characteristic of many of the most interesting cultural and artistic exchanges, relationships and texts of this period. To make and remake Hoccleve’s literary reputation, as this conference will aim to do, is to also reach new understandings of the uncertain and rapidly changing cultural position of English poetry in the fifteenth century. We hope you can join us in Manitoba this summer. The tentative conference program is available below.

Tentative conference schedule:

Friday, July 6

9:15-10:45 Session 1. Form

• Hoccleve and the Logic of Incompleteness

R. D. Perry, New Chaucer Society Postdoctoral Fellow

• The Influence of John Walton’s de Consolatione on Hoccleve’s Metrical Style

Nicholas Myklebust, Regis University

• Hoccleve and Suso, Revisited

Steven Rozenski University of Rochester

10:45-11:15 Break

11:15-12:30 Keynote

 “Ransakid” by Death: Body, Soul and Image in Hoccleve’s “Lerne to Die.”

Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne

12:30-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:30 Session 2. Circulation

• Friends Made Along the Way: Situating Huntington MS HM 111

Dylan Matthews, Bangor University

• Hoccleve and Speght: Chaucer Scholars “wrytynge playne”

Cameron Burt, University of Manitoba

• Anti-establishment Hoccleve and Resistance in the Archives

Elon Lang, University of Texas at Austin

Robin Wharton, Georgia State University

3:30-4:00 Break

4:00-5:30 Workshop 1. Making Poetry

Aditi Nafde, Newcastle University

Jenni Nuttall, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford

David Watt, University of Manitoba

5:30-7:30 Dinner

7:30-8:45 Keynote

The noise the words make: religious aureation and orthodox reform in early fifteenth-century England

Vincent Gillespie, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

Saturday, July 7

9:15-10:45 Session 3. Belief

• Curatorial Hoccleve: Bookishness and Saintliness in the Regiment of Princes

Ruen-Chuan Ma, Utah Valley University

• ‘And to that ende, here is remembrance’: Registers of Petition in ‘The Monk and Our Lady’s Sleeves’

Laurie Atkinson, Durham University

• Holy Hoccleve

Sebastian Langdell, Vassar College

10:45-11:15 Break

11:15-12:45 Workshop 2. Digital Tools for the Study of Hoccleve

Robin Wharton, Georgia State University

Elon Lang, University of Texas at Austin

12:45-2:15 Lunch

2:15-3:45 Session 4. Language

• Hoccleve and the Visual Force of Language

Taylor Cowdery, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Speech Acts and Conversation in the Series

A. Arwen Taylor, Arkansas Tech University

• Hoccleve as a Voice of Restlessness and Reason: The Concepts of Fortune, Poverty, and Boethian Philosophy in The Regiment of Princes 

Bradley J. Peppers, Georgia State University

3:45-4:15 Break

4:15-5:30 Keynote

Extraordinary Bodies

Amy Appleford, Boston University

6:00-8:00 Conference Dinner

Sunday, July 8

9:15-10:45 Session 5. Embodiment

• Homosocial Hoccleve

Michelle Ripplinger, University of California at Berkeley

• Life Could Be a Dream: Form and Affect in the Prologue to the Regement of Princes

Travis Neel, The Ohio State University

• Hoccleve, Swelling and Bursting

Spencer Strub, University of California at Berkeley

10:45-11:15 Break

11:15-12:45 Workshop 3. Hoccleve: telling stories

Nicholas Perkins, St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford

12:45-2:15 Lunch

2:15-3:30 Response

Nicholas Watson, Harvard University

3:30-3:45 Conference Closure

 

 

As we have done for the last three years the International Hoccleve Society is very pleased to be sponsoring the 4th Annual Hoccleve Recovery Day, this November 1 on social media. We are excited to welcome you and your students to participate by posting something related to our theme (and perhaps to Hoccleve) with the hashtag #Hoccleve at least once on a major social media site like Facebook or Twitter that day. The theme this year is “Recovery and Activism” Our full call is below the line. We really hope you will participate and we look forward to seeing what you’ll post!

The International Hoccleve Society Sponsors the 4th Annual Hoccleve Recovery Day: Recovery and Activism

Politics has a tendency to be maddening, and in recent months such a connection has been distressingly literal. Public discourse is increasingly accepting and understanding of mental illness and its treatment, but at the same time the availability of services and treatments is under attack by federal budget proposals. The Hoccleve Society would like to use this year’s annual Recovery Day to view mental and other personal health initiatives through the lens of expressions of distress and recovery and their context in our politicized world.

Thomas Hoccleve situated his melancholic desolation in his “Complaint” within the context of a bustling urban environment that metonymically expressed the constraints of national politics: the “prees” of London and Westminster crowds oppressed and turned on him an overwhelming and maddening “straunge countinaunce,” reflective of the alienating and repressive cultural policies of the Lancastrian kings. Scholars argue that Hoccleve’s poems were political expressions, perhaps of complicity but more likely of resistance and a struggle for identity and purpose.

At a time when American and global politics seem to be entering a new era of repression, socially we are also entering a phase of resistance that refuses to bow to mistruths and injustice. Just as Hoccleve sought truth through writing and self-expression, we invite you to share social media posts—which might include quotations from Hoccleve or other medieval writers—about your own processes of coming to terms with and reordering a disordered world. How do you envision members of a global community using activism and self-assertion in a fight for rights and humanity, harnessing together personal and political recovery?

On 1 November 2017, post your thoughts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and our society’s website with the hashtag #Hoccleve. Look out for our own posts on our site and our Hoccleve Lyfe Coache, Twitter and Facebook feeds; and “like” or retweet thematically pertinent items throughout the day under the #Hoccleve hashtag followed by any other tags you’d like, such as #recovery, #thisiswhataprofessorlookslike, #MiddleEnglish, or #MSilluminations. Please follow us, participate, and “like” us to stay tuned! We will be compiling posts tagged with our #Hoccleve hashtag into a Storify page after the day for us all to use as resource and touchstone in the coming weeks and months.

IHS is pleased to announce that we will be sponsoring a session in partnership with the Lydgate Society at the 2018 ICMS in Kalamazoo.

Hoccleve, Lydgate, and their Patrons

There’s much to tie Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate together: a shared language, political life under both Ricardian and Lancastrian rule, a purported love for “father” Chaucer, and—perhaps most important—a single network of patrons and benefactors. Their poetic accounts regarding the lived experience of this common ground, however, could not be more different. As Robert Meyer-Lee has observed, Lydgate is, in social and economic terms, “the kind of poet” that Hoccleve failed to become. Where Hoccleve repeatedly describes seeking and not finding steady patronage, Lydgate managed to do so with apparent ease; where Hoccleve’s works apart from the Regiment of Princes appear to have circulated only in modest numbers, Lydgate’s verse found great favor among a variety of audiences, including merchants, craftsmen, scholars, and the nobility. This panel reassesses Hoccleve and Lydgate’s shared literary moment by focusing, in particular, on their varied relationship to patronage. Sample questions that might be explored include the following: Does Lydgate view Prince Hal in the same way that Hoccleve does? How do Lydgate and Hoccleve select or manage their patrons, particularly in light of the dangerous currents of the Lancastrian court? Why, for example, is the Fall of Princes dedicated to Duke Humphrey (in the case of Lydgate) or the Series dedicated to a shifting set of patrons (in the case of Hoccleve)? And to what extent may Lydgate and Hoccleve be said to deploy what John Burrow has termed “petitionary poetics?”

We are thrilled that Robert Meyer-Lee has agreed to serve as a respondent to the panel of papers. Abstracts addressing either or both of these poets and the question of patronage should be emailed to Taylor Cowdery (cowdery@email.unc.edu) by no later than September 15. Inquiries also welcome.

The Hoccleve society sponsored two sessions this year, which dovetailed quite well towards an investigation of the work Hoccleve does on the page and the work we do in the classroom. Thank you to Danielle Bradley for writing this excellent recap.

Hoccleve at Play (Session 473)

A panel titled “Hoccleve at Play” might seem to have little to do with work—and panelists reminded that Hoccleve himself often counters work and play in his texts—Travis Neel pointed out that poetry represents a labor output and can be considered part of a bureaucratic job that requires securing patronage, job security, and promotion. In David Watt’s words, “the work of bureaucracy never ends,” and uncertainty over pay risks leaving one’s work seeming purposeless.

Watt’s “Does this Stress Make Me Look Fat? Awkwardness in Thomas Hoccleve’s Verse” explored the awkward situations Hoccleve finds himself in due to the government’s inability to pay its employees. It is a tricky task to ask one’s employer for money, and Hoccleve’s major mode of play is that of awkwardness, belaboring the point of his own dilemmatic consternation. He creates this mood of cringe-worthy humor through rather literal play on the meaning of the word “awkward” as facing or turning in the wrong direction. In terms of form, word order causes the reader to turn forward and backward, mirroring how Hoccleve himself does not know where to turn. Awkward can also refer to misalignment between expectation and actual behavior. In “Male regle” Hoccleve understands “play” to mean drinking, merriment and verbal sparring, but not sex or manly combativeness; this reticence from a tavern-goer appears awkwardly uncomfortable to a reader. Associates in “My Complaint” turn away on the streets or contort their faces in grimace at him. Onlookers feel awkward either because Hoccleve has, in his madness, done something unexpected, or because they themselves did not meet expectations as friends; readers feel awkward because we are unsure whether this character is truly Hoccleve or a persona (and whether we should be privy to his personal revelations). Yet Watt argued that awkwardness is, ultimately, not isolating but uniting, because the mood spreads and captures others who join Hoccleve in a community with shared problems.

Travis Neel presented another way Hoccleve sustains bureaucratic community in “Convolutions H: Play, Time, Work in Hoccleve’s Ballades to Henri Somer.” Channeling Walter Benjamin, Neel commented on how work risked feeling mirthless to Hoccleve because insufficient funds for play created an unbroken labor. In his poem addressed to his feasting group the Court of Good Company Hoccleve longs for the traditional progression of the seasons—including pay days and the feast days which pay arrears threaten. Given the probably high cost of membership, Hoccleve seems willing to spend much of his wages on these opportunities for collegial revelry, and therefore this loss is significant to him. The poet contrasts the “unnatural” timescale with his own formal mastery, and Neel suggested that reading these more lighthearted and pleasurable poems alongside the more serious Series which likely dates to around the same time will move scholars to revaluate their view of Hoccleve as a “bungling bureaucrat and old misfit.” Searching for a distinct “Hocclevean Irony” leads Neel to claim that greater attention to formal elements, including Hoccleve’s playfulness and control, will show that Hoccleve deserves the same assumption of distance between author and persona that Chaucer receives in ironic readings.

Taylor Cowdery’s “Funny Money in Hoccleve’s Begging Poems” similarly found Hoccleve bemoaning unnatural materials—in this case clipped coins—and how they represent a failed covenant between government and civil servant. The poet and his Friend in the “Dialogue with a Friend” search for something for the poet to write, and the Friend determines that if he is to write for Prince Henry it must “be good mateer and vertuous” (637). Cowdery traced the meaning of “virtuous” in Middle English usage, finding that it could mean both ethically upstanding or physically strong. Words that are virtuous have both material and formal force. Hoccleve’s discourse on clipped coins in his begging poems become significant in this light, especially given the metaphorical nature of literature as a currency which spreads and forges connections. And like words, coins’ value rests in both their material and form. Hoccleve’s anger at unnatural money represents resentment towards unnatural words, whose form and meaning are out of sync. Money ought not be malleable, but slippage of meaning and puns, for instance in the ballads to Henri Somer, suggest this malleability and thus the mismatch between the wage owed and the empty pocket; and the need for Somer’s own words ordering the wages at the exchequer to be real not counterfeit. Cowdery stressed an interpretation of this poem that sees Hoccleve turning to play as a strategy for working the mechanisms of government in his favor—though he reminded that play is not always or necessarily pleasurable.

In her paper “Hoccleve Ludens: Playing With De Ludo Scaccorum in the Regiment of Princes” Amanda Walling further refined what we mean by “play” in Hoccleve’s poems, also finding an anger and a “slipperiness” rather than outright comedy. One type of slipperiness involves gameplay and the association between pieces and their rules for movement, and the categories of persons those pieces represent. Hoccleve’s Regiment draws on Jacobus de Cessolis’s De Ludo Scaccorum, a chess manual and “work of social theory” comprising regulatory play—rules to establish order—and word play useful to its narrator to discuss kings and other figures analogically as chess pieces. Hoccleve’s adaptation downplays regulation of kings but punningly criticizes the exchequer and its late payment of his wages. The wordplay might lessen the critique, but Walling argues that Hoccleve undertook this strategy out of desperation—it underscores how unfunny he thinks his financial quandary is. His treatment of one story from Jacobus comes across as awkward or perhaps unintentionally funny because “tonally inappropriate.” This tale, about a king triumphing over corrupt ministers, appears within the context of the “bureaucratic anxieties” which Hoccleve expresses in the Regiment to be more an indictment of leadership as tyrannical. Overall, Walling views Hoccleve’s manipulation of his sources as representative of his feelings of civil servants being treated as king’s playthings or pawns, and his recognition that the game of power he is implicated in lacks the clear rules of engagement that Jacobus’s does.

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Teaching Hoccleve, A Roundtable (Session 401)

If our above panelists stressed Hoccleve’s deservedness of a paycheck, our pedagogy roundtable participants established Hoccleve’s place in Middle English canon and his utility for instructing college students in vernacular poetics and medieval literary culture.

Elon Lang made this point most assertively, detailing his deployment of the Regiment of Princes in an undergraduate Great Books curriculum. A Great Books course introduces students to foundational Western literature furnishing ideas vital to modern informed inquiry, and Lang claims a place for Hoccleve among them because of its theme of leadership and the relationship between civil service and government power. Hoccleve was at the heart of contemporary discourses on educated citizenship and political theory, and has important lessons to offer students regarding these issues in the present day. Lang justifies teaching the entirely of the Regiment and not just the excerpts that often appear in syllabi, because sustained contact with the text causes students to develop language and content analysis skills—the unfamiliar language forces them to slow down and read closely and collaboratively. This strategy avoids pairing the text with its long history of negative academic criticism, and Lang noted that students have no problem accepting the Regiment alongside other pillars of liberal arts education like Aquinas or Shakespeare. To better tackle a difficult text, Lang asks students to collectively create their own rewritings of the material in modern language, then assigns them a “creative reinterpretation” of the poem, a fiction cast within Hoccleve’s fiction of writing for Prince Henry.

Bill Quinn also finds Middle English poetry useful in a history of reading course for leading students toward close reading and attention to the details that would have shaped the medieval reading experience. He overcomes harsh academic judgements on Hoccleve’s metrical skills by finding in the Regiment markers of difference—Hoccleve might not be representative of the era’s most skilled poets, but this is because he had different intentions which are themselves worthy of study and provide a challenge for students of verse form. Quinn finds evidence of the Regiment as a text meant to be delivered orally, but also that Hoccleve foresaw the text being copied and moved around by various hands. For example the rhyme scheme of the envoy scene requires careful attention to the textual artifact as the rhymes would work less well orally, and there are many references throughout the poem to hands and writing but none related to mouths or speaking. Hoccleve’s lines are meant to be “heard” with the fingers, and learning this not only allows students to accept this poet as a legitimate and skilled contributor to Middle English canon, it also offers important evidence on the transition from orality to textuality and what readers wished to get out of the activity.

Nick Myklebust engages with Hoccleve’s canonicity in the literature classroom by teaching a course that pits him against Chaucer. Myklebust noted that transitional texts fit awkwardly into traditional surveys of British literature, and he wishes to capitalize on this difficulty by drawing student attention to questions of periodization and other categorization structures that give meaning to literature. His students use Hoccleve to probe what it means to be medieval or early modern, and what decisions scholars make when they place writers into relative frameworks—such as judging Hoccleve’s merits based on Chaucer’s. While Chaucer’s themes are often “ephemeral” and “slippery,” Hoccleve’s characters and purposes can be easier for students to grasp. So-called marginal literary figures can also help students see why Chaucer himself was important and transformative, as they offer more concrete samples of how literature appeared before and after.

Siobhan Calkin uses Hoccleve in undergraduate courses to illustrate issues of patronage, Lancastrian governance, and Lollardy, but also utilizes Hoccleve’s texts for teaching documentary skills. In a graduate course on medieval authorship and authority she assigns students to work with the Hoccleve Archive, a collection of manuscript images, concordances, collation tables, and other resources. She asks students to produce an edition of a stanza of the Regiment by moving through the various stages a professional editor would. Students transcribe a portion of a manuscript and check their work against crowdsourced transcriptions on the website. They research the assigned manuscript and describe key paleographic features of the scribal hand, contending with issues editors would discuss in text notes.

David Watt put the audience to work by leading them through a manuscript-centered activity he uses in the undergraduate classroom, which he has previously published about in the journal Pedagogy. The activity asks students to think about the medieval reading process by encountering a poem (a roundel from a ballad to Henri Somer) in its varying layers by means of a handout with stages: edited text, appearance in manuscript form in Hoccleve’s own handwriting, and finally context within a whole manuscript page. In this way Watt shows the importance of confronting students with actual manuscript artifacts, and the possibility of doing so when digital or archival resources are not available. Hoccleve’s marginality prevents students from approaching the text through the preconceived notions they might have of a figure like Chaucer, yet unlike anonymous texts students can actually pinpoint the poems’ historical environment.

Far from a dispassionate manuscript study, Stephanie Trigg teaches Hoccleve in a course on medieval passions and presents scenes of intense emotions—the mirror scene of the Series’ “Complaint,” for instance. Students contend with poems that do not use emotion words and whose descriptions of emotional moments are circumscribed, but in which characters are clearly experiencing and performing emotions. Trigg compares Hoccleve with Troilus and Criseyde to draw attention to scenes when a character practices emotionality—Hoccleve his facial expressions in front of a mirror, Troilus the words he wishes to say to Criseyde. Such scenes allow students to address questions of normality and exceptionality in late medieval England, and conceptions of selfhood.

In a 2014 Chaucer Review essay, Larry Scanlon argues this is ‘a good time for taking stock’ of critical approaches to Hoccleve and of the future of Hoccleve studies, ‘in part because of Hoccleve’s success, in part because historicism’s influence now seems on the wane’.  Thanks to his topicality and partisanship, Hoccleve’s engagements with politics and power have been explored in some detail in the last twenty-five years, and his place in Middle English studies is now well established.  As scholarship has moved beyond old and new historicisms toward fresh horizons, recent scholars have begun to identify other, less familiar Hoccleves: curial, priestly and clergial Hoccleve, for example, as well as Hoccleve the pacifist or an ascetic self, comparable to Julian of Norwich.  What other Hoccleves will hold the attention of criticism in coming decades?

It is fitting that this question should be the focus of the first conference to be hosted by the International Hoccleve Society (https://hocclevesociety.org/). The aim of the society and of the conference is to map and inspire future directions of research into the making of Thomas Hoccleve by bringing together established and emerging scholars.  We are delighted that Amy Appleford (Boston), Vincent Gillespie (LMH, Oxford), and Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne) will share plenary talks and that Nicholas Watson will respond to the conference as a whole. We now invite papers that consider Hoccleve as a maker of texts and of manuscript books as well as papers that examine the making of his critical reputation. Scanlon argues that Hoccleve offers ‘a wonderful test case for the relation between poetry and ideology’, but which ideologies might be most relevant and most illuminating? We seek papers that will critically examine current positions and break new ground by placing Hoccleve in new cultural contexts and reading his texts from different theoretical perspectives.

We therefore invite scholars to explore a range of questions about Thomas Hoccleve and his making. For example, how might we set his poetry, which is often celebrated for its idiosyncrasies and individuality, in broader frameworks? How might we re-examine its relationship to literary history?  Hoccleve’s closeness to Chaucer is well known but what other early influences, in English, French and Latin, shaped his writing?  Why do he and Lydgate, both writing for the same Lancastrian patrons, each studiously avoid reference to their rival?  Hoccleve is a key early-adopter of Chaucerian language, style, versification and metrical practice.  But Hoccleve also refuses much of Chaucer’s potential legacy (for example the genre of dream-vision, the mode of courtly allegory, narratives of cities of the pagan past such as Troy and Thebes) when Lydgate does not.  Where do those refusals leave Hoccleve in relation to English poetic history and what motivates them?  Did he influence Middle Scots makers, alongside the works of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate?  What happens to the Lancastrian Regiment of Princes, a popular text surviving in whole or part in nearly fifty manuscripts, during the rule of the House of York?  What can this substantial corpus of manuscripts tell us about the reading of poetry and of political advice in the fifteenth century?

Hoccleve played an active role in the making of his own books as well as the translation of a range of texts drawn from several languages and traditions. Is Charles R. Blyth right that Hoccleve was not ‘widely read’, when his source-texts can be diverse and surprising?  Where and in what forms did Hoccleve encounter these source texts?  What linguistic theories and intentions underpin his translations of orthodox religious writing (especially given the context of Arundel’s Constitutions)?  And what about the diverse audiences for Hoccleve’s own poetry?  Hoccleve wrote not only for fellow civil servants but also for London citizens and members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Some works might serve the antifeminist world of ‘London club culture’ (as Derek Pearsall has named it), but other works respond to the interests and reading habits of noblewomen, while Nancy Bradley Warren has put the Regiment in the hands of female monastics in the early sixteenth century. How can Hoccleve studies take account of such diversity while offering a coherent account of this author?  How might new approaches inform our understanding of Hoccleve in this context?

Hoccleve inhabits a middle position between ‘clerical’ and ‘lay’ literary and intellectual cultures, a middle position also characteristic of many of the most interesting cultural and artistic exchanges, relationships and texts of this period.  To make and remake Hoccleve’s literary reputation, as this conference will aim to do, is to also reach new understandings of the uncertain and rapidly changing cultural position of English poetry in the fifteenth century.

We invite proposals for complete sessions and individual presentations. Proposals for complete sessions may take a variety of forms: a set of three, twenty-minute presentations; several position papers, seminar discussions, etc. Proposals for individual presentations should describe a twenty-minute presentation. We ask that all prospective participants (whether members of a complete panel or individual presenters) submit a proposal that describes your contribution that does not exceed 150 words (including the title); we also ask that each participant submit a 100-word explanation of how coming to the conference might contribute to your work. Proposals should be sent by August 31, 2017 to Jenni Nuttall and David Watt via the email address hocclevesociety@gmail.com. Earlier submissions are welcome.

The International Hoccleve Society is committed to ensuring that students and scholars who wish to present at the conference can be accommodated. We are seeking external support to fund as much of this conference as we can. This is why we are asking for both a very short proposal and an explanation of how this conference might contribute to your work. Although it may not be possible for us to cover all costs for all participants, we hope to secure enough funding to ensure that participation in this conference is not limited for financial reasons. As an additional measure to help overcome financial barriers for students and scholars alike, we have scheduled the conference to take place during the weekend prior to the meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Toronto. This way, scholars from far afield will be able to attend both conferences on a single trip to Canada.