hocclevesociety

The International Hoccleve Society has begun to assemble a library of pedagogical essays and open-access teaching materials to help teachers and students bring Hoccleve’s poetry into the classroom.

Our first contribution comes from Dr. Brendan O’Connell, Assistant Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. Dr. O’Connell reflects on the successes and challenges of teaching “My Complaint” in spring 2020:

The closure of my university (Trinity College Dublin) due to the Coronavirus pandemic presented a different set of challenges: how to teach the ‘Complaint’ remotely, when neither I nor my students had access to the usual resources. While my experience of online teaching during the closure has been challenging, teaching this text was extremely positive and will shape the way I teach it in the future.

Read on here. And if you have materials to contribute, please reach out!

Jenni Nuttall has made two more translations available for students, teachers, and all other lovers of Hoccleve:

• The first is an excerpt from Hoccleve’s blockbuster, The Regiment of Princes, with valuable advice for weathering anxiety-producing times like our own.
• The second is Hoccleve’s Male Regle in its entirety, a lament of the poet’s unruly lifestyle and a request to remedy his “empty wallet and terrible hardships.”

Other translations and resources can be consulted on the Texts page. We invite further contributions!

The International Hoccleve Society is pleased to announce a growing library of Modern English translations of Hoccleve’s poetry, including Dr. Jenni Nuttall’s translation of Hoccleve’s “Complaint” and Emily Price’s translation of Hoccleve’s Ballades to Henry Somer.

Other translations and resources for students and teachers are compiled on the Texts page of this website. The IHS welcomes further contributions!

On November 1, c. 1415, Alle Hallowmesse, Thomas Hoccleve’s period of mental illness came to an end as his wits returned to him—which allowed him to return to his twofold program of work, as a poet and at the Privy Seal. Scribal work was hard—and potentially dangerous to body, mind, soul, and pocketbook—and Hoccleve didn’t let readers of his poetry forget this. His Friend from the eponymous “Dialogue with Friend” even suggests Hoccleve may have been a victim of overwork, his mental affliction caused by his “bisy studie” (line 302).

Yet, as critics have noted, Hoccleve believed work was a sort of cure, if not for his illness then at least for his subsequent problem of alienation from his associates. He chastises his friend for his suspicions, declaring that his “Complaint” ought to be sufficient evidence of his recovery (lines 317-18).

This November 1, we face our own maddening onslaught of work, with midterms and holiday preparations, and many of us will habitually feel like we never quite get enough done. Let us remember Hoccleve and his ultimately optimistic view of scribal labor and the relationship between writing, memory and selfhood. We celebrate both Thomas Hoccleve’s work and his recovery, reflecting on how our own work seeks to recover Middle English poetry and evidence of late medieval life, and on the personal and public importance of that work.

Please join us on Recovery Day through social media by posting your thoughts or thematically pertinent medieval quotations and images 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 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!

Identity in Public Contexts: Hoccleve and Langland in Conversation

While scholars often note that Hoccleve’s and Langland’s poetic personae each make the other more understandable, rarely have these poets been analyzed together in great detail. Thus, with this session, The International Hoccleve Society and International Piers Plowman Society seek to provide an occasion to do so. The Societies invite paper submissions that examine the ways interpretive discourses around Hoccleve’s and Langland’s works overlap and intersect. On the broadly-defined topic of public identity-formation, participants might consider how these poets construct identities for themselves, or for other identifiable social groups–asking: how and why might Langland and Hoccleve distinguish specifically public identities from each other and from private identity? Participants might also explore the politicization of identity, such as in late-medieval satire and advice on good governance in the context of 14th and 15th century political struggles. Other related questions might include: how do medieval depictions of writing as labor reveal interfaces between discourses of interiority and political speech? Or, how were revision and editing used by poets and scribes–like Hoccleve and Langland–as a means for their own (or others’) social/political rehabilitation? How do either or both poets position themselves in relation to religious or professional communities that are themselves enmeshed in complex public and private interconnections?

Please send 150-300 word paper proposals that engage with these topics or others that suggest ways that Hoccleve and Langland might be put into conversation with each other to Elon Lang, elon.lang@gmail.com, by September 15, 2018. Please send a completed Participant Information Form (available on the Conference website in July 2018) along with your submission, noting your A/V requirements.