September 20, 2021 · 2:37 pm

Hoccleve at Home, 2021-22

It gives us great delight to announce the schedule of “Hoccleve at Home” events for the upcoming academic year. Please mark your calendars, and we are excited to have such an excellent lineup of speakers!

For announcements about video links and other information, please email hocclevesociety@gmail.com, and we can put you on the “Hoccleve at Home” mailing list. We also welcome proposals for future “Hoccleve at Home” events at the same address. We look forward to seeing you online soon!

Fall 2021

  • October 11, 1 PM Central Time (North America): Nicholas Perkins (Oxford Univ.) and Ethan Knapp (Ohio State Univ.), in dialogue on the evolution of Hoccleve scholarship, on the 20th anniversary of their respective Hoccleve monographs, moderated by Sebastian Langdell
  • November 1, 1 PM CT: Amy Appleford (Boston Univ.) and Christopher Baswell (Columbia Univ. and Barnard Coll.), in dialogue on Hoccleve and disability studies, moderated by Ruen-chuan Ma
  • December 13, 1 PM CT: Laurie Atkinson (Durham Univ.), “Hoccleve’s Nearly-Dream Poem, The Regiment of Princes, 1-2016,” moderated by Ruen-chuan Ma

Spring 2022 (dates to be announced)

  • February 2022: Philip Knox (Cambridge Univ.), “Debating the Romance of the Rose across the Channel: Thomas Hoccleve and Christine de Pizan,” moderated by Sebastian Langdell
  • March 2022: Sonja Drimmer (Univ. Massachusetts, Amherst), Jonathan Hsy (George Washington Univ.), Bridget Whearty (Binghamton Univ.-SUNY), a roundtable discussion in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the Burrow-Doyle facsimile, moderated by Sebastian Langdell
  • May 2022: Grad student mini-paper roundtable (details TBA)

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July 27, 2021 · 12:04 am

CFP! The May Poems of Thomas Hoccleve: a ‘Hoccleve at Home’ Workshop and Discussion (ICMS Kalamazoo 2022)

As that I walkid in the monthe of May

Besyde a groue in an heuy musynge,

Floures dyuerse I sy, right fressh and gay,

And briddes herde, I eek lustyly synge,

That to myn herte yaf a confortynge.

 “Ballad for Master Robert Chichele” lines 1-5

As participants of the International Congress on Medieval Studies, we fondly recall spending the early Michigan springtime together walking around the verdant campus of WMU and the flowering tree-lined streets of Kalamazoo, and we long to do so again soon. To honor the conviviality of this medievalist tradition, the International Hoccleve Society invites Middle English readers at any stage of their careers to join us for a workshop and discussion on Thomas Hoccleve’s “May Poems.” These mid-length lyrics, including the “The Court of Good Company,” “L’epistre de Cupide”, and the “Ballad for Master Robert Chichele” are rarely discussed together because of their very different occasions of composition: one is a begging poem, another a defense of women, and the third an appeal to the Virgin for spiritual absolution. That said, they are all explicitly set in the month of May and they all share formal and thematic qualities that Hoccleve is known for throughout his oeuvre, including a sustained use of seasonal symbolism to create motifs of rebirth and renewal. 

In this 90-minute workshop, the Hoccleve Society proposes to assemble an online panel of workshop facilitators to share their approaches to teaching and analyzing these poems and to lead an interactive discussion about the relationships between these texts. This format is designed to build on the very successful series of online talks and discussions called “Hoccleve at Home” that the Society has sponsored throughout 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, the total time for introductory presentations by panelists will be limited to 35-45 minutes to leave plenty of time for a discussion of the readings among facilitators and attendees (the readings will be made available in advance of the Congress on our website). We are particularly interested in having facilitators on the panel who can present a variety of interpretive approaches to these texts, including, but not limited to, historical contextualization of their settings and moments of creation (particularly as revealed by extant manuscripts), exploration of gender politics and performance in the lyrics, examination of Hoccleve’s translation from French sources (acknowledged and unacknowledged), and analysis of formal and metrical qualities of Hoccleve’s verse. 

Scholars interested in joining the panel to present a 5 to 7-minute introduction and discussion prompt may contact Elon Lang at elon.lang@gmail.com, Ruen-chuan Ma at RMa@uvu.edu, or Sebastian Langdell at Sebastian_Langdell@baylor.edu by September 15, 2021.

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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 – 1pm Eastern, 7pm GMT Misty Schieberle (University of Kansas), “‘What stiketh by?’: The Letter of Cupid and The Harley 219 Glossary”
  • Feb 22, 2021 – 1pm Eastern, 7pm GMT Sebastian Sobecki (Groningen), “Life Imitates Art: MS Harley 219, The Gesta Romanorum, and Hoccleve’s Poetics of Autobiography”
  • March 22, 2021 – 1pm Eastern, 6pm GMT Jane Griffiths (Oxford), “‘Whi stant this word heer?’ Glossing and Reading in Hoccleve’s ‘Remonstrance to Oldcastle'”
  • 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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