January 14, 2021 · 5:58 pm

Upcoming Hoccleve at Home sessions for spring 2021

The Hoccleve Society is excited to announce four talks this spring by Hoccleve scholars from around the globe:

  • Jan 25, 2021 – Misty Schieberle (University of Kansas), “‘What stiketh by?’: The Letter of Cupid and The Harley 219 Glossary”
  • Feb 22, 2021 – Sebastian Sobecki (Groningen), “Life Imitates Art: MS Harley 219, The Gesta Romanorum, and Hoccleve’s Poetics of Autobiography”
  • March 22, 2021 – Jane Griffiths (Oxford), title TBA
  • May 3, 2021 – Rebecca Clark (Dartmouth), title TBA
  • June 7, 2021 – Daniel Wakelin (Oxford), “Hoccleve and Ruling”

If you would like to join us, please contact us at hocclevesociety@gmail.com to receive a meeting link. We will add you to a dedicated mailing list for future announcements and seminar materials.

If you’re interested in presenting, we continue to invite brief proposals (~500 words) for topics on Hoccleve and any aspect of his works. In the proposal, please provide an overview of your topic and a description of your planned format of presentation. As a general guideline, we suggest having a presentation of about 15 to 20 minutes in length to allow for a stronger focus and ample discussion. Seminars meet for about an hour. Please send proposals to hocclevesociety@gmail.com with “Hoccleve at Home” in the subject line.

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October 26, 2020 · 4:43 pm

Seventh Annual Hoccleve Recovery Day: Illness and Recovery

Allas, wher is this worldes stablenesse?

Heer up, heer doun; heer honour, heer repreef;

Now hool, now seek; now bountee, now mescheef.

Regiment of Princes, ll. 47-49

In 1415, Thomas Hoccleve got very sick, got better, and found himself unsure how to return to the world on the other side of his illness. The millions of us who have contracted Covid-19 and recovered can empathize. Those who still struggle with symptoms, who face unemployment and dislocation, and who have lost loved ones may understand his “greef” all the more intensely. For the seventh annual Hoccleve Recovery Day on social media, November 1, 2020, the International Hoccleve Society asks for your reflections on illness and recovery in the age of Covid. 

What lessons can we take from Hoccleve’s account of solitude, alienation, “anger and inpacience” in recovery? What models of writing and scholarship does he offer, in sickness and in health, for better or worse? How does Thomas’s “verry shame and feer” in public chime with our own anxieties around contagion and responsibility? Can we compare our regimes of surveillance and monitoring with the inquisitive eyes Thomas thinks follow him in the London crowd? That is to say, how are Hoccleve’s experiences of ableism and judgment comparable not only to those of people experiencing mental illness, but also to those recovering from COVID-19? Do Hoccleve and his contemporaries give us fitting ways of thinking through the relationship between the health of the individual body natural and the corporate body politic? And if “commvnynge is the beste assay,” how might we continue to commune in an era of quarantines and isolation?

Please join us this Recovery Day, November 1, 2020, by posting your thoughts or thematically pertinent medieval quotations and images across social media with the hashtag #Hoccleve. Look out for our own posts on our website, the @THoccleve and @HoccleveSociety Twitter feeds, thoccleve on Instagram, and International Hoccleve Society on Facebook. Like or share/retweet items throughout the day and feel free to append other tags to #Hoccleve, such as #recovery, #thisiswhataprofessorlookslike, #MiddleEnglish, or #MSilluminations. Please follow us, participate, and “like” us to stay tuned!

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September 9, 2020 · 9:38 pm

Hoccleve at Home, Fall 2020 – Spring 2021

Mark your calendars for the following upcoming Hoccleve at Home sessions:

  • Oct 5, 2020 – Nicholas Myklebust (Regis University), “Hoccleve’s Metrical Game, or The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucrat”
  • Nov 2, 2020 – Liza Strakhov (Marquette University), “Making a Man out of Hoccleve”
  • Jan 25, 2021 – Misty Schieberle (University of Kansas), “‘What stiketh by?’: The Letter of Cupid and The Harley 219 Glossary”
  • Feb 22, 2021 – Sebastian Sobecki (Groningen), “Life Imitates Art: MS Harley 219, The Gesta Romanorum, and Hoccleve’s Poetics of Autobiography”
  • March 22, 2021 – Jane Griffiths (Oxford), title TBA
  • May 3, 2021 – Rebecca Clark (Dartmouth), title TBA
  • June 7, 2021 – Daniel Wakelin (Oxford), “Hoccleve and Ruling”

If you would like to join us, please contact us at hocclevesociety@gmail.com to receive a meeting link. We will add you to a dedicated mailing list for future announcements and seminar materials.

If you’re interested in presenting, we continue to invite brief proposals (~500 words) for topics on Hoccleve and any aspect of his works. In the proposal, please provide an overview of your topic and a description of your planned format of presentation. As a general guideline, we suggest having a presentation of about 15 to 20 minutes in length to allow for a stronger focus and ample discussion. Seminars meet for about an hour. Please send proposals to hocclevesociety@gmail.com with “Hoccleve at Home” in the subject line.

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July 28, 2020 · 3:03 pm

Upcoming Hoccleve at Home sessions

Our next “Hoccleve at Home” event is scheduled for Wednesday, August 12, at 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK and Ireland time, when David Watt (University of Manitoba) will present “You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Psalm is About You: Awkwardness in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series.” If you would like to join us, please email us at hocclevesociety@gmail.com to receive a meeting link. We will add you to a dedicated mailing list for future announcements and seminar materials.

Looking forward, mark your calendars for Monday, October 5, when Nicholas Myklebust (Regis University) will present “Hoccleve’s Metrical Game, or The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucrat.”

If you’re interested in presenting, we continue to invite brief proposals (~500 words) for topics on Hoccleve and any aspect of his works. In the proposal, please provide an overview of your topic and a description of your planned format of presentation. As a general guideline, we suggest having a presentation of about 15 to 20 minutes in length to allow for a stronger focus and ample discussion. Seminars meet for about an hour. Please send proposals to hocclevesociety@gmail.com with “Hoccleve at Home” in the subject line.

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July 12, 2020 · 3:24 pm

CFP: IMC Leeds 2021, Hoccleve and “Climates”

International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2021

Special Thematic Strand: Climates

International Hoccleve Society Sponsored Session

 

‘What world is this, how vndirstande am I?’

(Thomas Hoccleve, Dialogue with a Friend, 774)

Climates of reception hostile and propitious are a recurrent feature in the poetry of Thomas Hoccleve. His dialogues with imagined interlocutors, envoys addressed to real and imagined readers, and presentation of his poems in autograph manuscripts provide tantalising evidence of the historical and material circumstances for Hoccleve’s reception, as well the currents of patronage and socio-literary systems which he was interested to evoke. The history of Hoccleve criticism, especially the remarkable increase in critical interest over the last few decades, is all the more indicative of shifting climates of reception for Hoccleve’s multifaceted career; how Hoccleve was and is understood is now a lively and wide-ranging scholarly conversation.

The International Hoccleve Society (IHS) is pleased to invite proposals for a sponsored session at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2021. The special thematic focus of the Congress is ‘Climates’, and the IHS is particularly interested in papers addressing ‘climates’ of reception in Hoccleve’s writings, their witnesses, and his critical heritage. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

  • Narratives of reception in Hoccleve’s writings
  • Hoccleve’s readers, real and imagined
  • Reviewing Hoccleve’s milieu in light of recent biographical discoveries
  • Hoccleve’s political and/or ecclesiological investments
  • Situating Hoccleve in manuscript and early print
  • Antiquarian interest in Hoccleve
  • Recent trends in Hoccleve criticism

To propose a paper, please send an abstract of maximum 250 words with your name and affiliation to laurie.r.atkinson@durham.ac.uk by 31 August 2020.

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July 2, 2020 · 4:59 pm

New tools for teaching Hoccleve

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!

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June 9, 2020 · 3:24 pm

Hoccleve at Home: Come for the Complaint, Stay for the Dialogue

A Series Presented by the International Hoccleve Society

The risks posed by the global pandemic has put academic conferences on hold for the time being and limited opportunities to develop and refine scholarship. To maintain collegial connections among our global community and to provide an interim venue for presenting works in progress and receiving feedback, the International Hoccleve Society is launching a series of informal online seminars, to be held on a regular basis. If you would like to join us, please send an email to hocclevesociety@gmail.com. We will add you to a dedicated mailing list for future announcements, seminar materials, and video links.

To help kick off our series, we will hold a seminar on Hoccleve’s neologisms, presented by Dr. Jenni Nuttall (Oxford) on Wednesday, June 24, 2020 at the following time:

11am – North America, Pacific

12pm – North America, Mountain

1pm – North America, Central

2pm – North America, Eastern

7pm – U.K. and Ireland

8pm – Central European

Looking ahead, we invite brief proposals (~500 words) for topics on Hoccleve and any aspect of his works—late medieval literature and culture, disability studies, manuscript studies, translation, gender theory, affect, religion, and so forth. Please provide an overview of your topic and a description of your planned format of presentation (e.g., giving a paper, pre-circulating materials for guided discussion, etc.). We aim to keep the format flexible in order to suit a variety of presentations and stages of work. As a general guideline, we suggest having a presentation of about 15 to 20 minutes in length to allow for a stronger focus and ample discussion, and we expect seminars to meet for about an hour.

Please send proposals to hocclevesociety@gmail.com with “Hoccleve at Home” in the subject line. Although acceptance is not guaranteed, we will make efforts to accommodate proposals from around the world and work out suitable dates and times, depending on scheduling and time zone constraints. We would especially welcome proposals from graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured or non-tenure-track faculty.

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April 18, 2020 · 5:22 pm

More Hoccleve translations from Jenni Nuttall

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

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

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February 2, 2020 · 3:36 pm

New translations and resources

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!

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November 1, 2019 · 4:04 pm

Recovering Hoccleve: A Series on Teaching Hoccleve

On Hoccleve Recovery Day, the International Hoccleve Society invites scholars and teachers of medieval literature to contribute to a new, ongoing series about teaching the works of Thomas Hoccleve. How have you incorporated Hoccleve’s works into the syllabi of your medieval literature classes, survey courses, or other teaching endeavors? How do you teach themes of mental illness, disability, and recovery? What are ways to make Hoccleve’s late medieval bureaucratic culture intelligible to today’s students? What activities and exercises do you use to help students engage with Hoccleve’s texts?

As part of the society’s on-going efforts to promote the use and study of Hoccleve’s works, we seek contributions that describe and offer critical commentary on short exercises, assignments, long-term projects, and other pedagogical activities. These can pertain to The Series, Regiment of Princes, short poems, or any other aspect of Hoccleve’s life and works. We welcome all pedagogical approaches and theoretical methodologies. Through regular features on our website and social media accounts, we seek to build a platform for pedagogical discussion and exchange.

We welcome submissions of any length to be sent to Elon Lang at elon.lang@gmail.com with CC to Ruen-chuan Ma at rma@uvu.edu, in docx or PDF format. Please include in your submission a 200-500 word description of how you implement the exercise or use the materials in your lessons. Publication of these exercises will be accepted on a rolling basis and released at intervals after review by the Hoccleve Society organizing committee and follow-up communication with the author.

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