Hoccleve Society

‘Take anothir Forme:’ The Selection of Forms in Thomas Hoccleve’s Work   

        The International Hoccleve Society is devoted to promoting scholarship on the late-medieval poet Thomas Hoccleve, provoking innovative research into his work, and providing a community for Hoccleve scholars. By sponsoring this session at the International Medieval Congress, we hope to provoke scholars to explore how recent critical interest in form and formalism might contribute to our understanding of Hoccleve’s work as a maker of poetry and books. At the same time, we hope to encourage scholars to consider how Hoccleve’s making of poetry and of books might contribute to our understanding of form in the early fifteenth century.

            As Christopher Cannon notes, “‘form’ is a slippery concept and this has long been true” (177). This session aims to take advantage of the slipperiness of form as a concept by inviting papers that define it broadly. We invite papers that explore literary, physical, and bureaucratic forms in all aspects of Hoccleve’s work—his poetic output as well as his work as a clerk of the Privy Seal. We anticipate that papers will explore the selection of literary forms in Hoccleve’s work, the selection of physical forms—formats—in which his work circulated and continues to circulate, or the selection of bureaucratic forms in Hoccleve’s formulary (London, British Library, MS Additional 24062). We also anticipate papers that will explore the relationships between these aspects of form.

            Papers in this session may also consider how well contemporary conceptions of form correspond with Hoccleve’s own use of the term. For the old man in the Regiment of Princes, the selection of forms has moral consequences. When he presses the narrator to follow only good advice, he warns that

If thow it weyve and take anothir forme,

Aftir thy childissh misreuled conceit,

Thow doost unto thyself harm and deceit. (RP 194-96)

The old man uses the word forme to denote a model to be copied, but the word weyve invites readers to consider its bureaucratic connotations as well. Hoccleve’s diction suggests that, in the bureaucratic and moral realms, the selection of form can determine the difference between “harm and deceit” and “reward and truth.” To what extent do these consequences apply to the selection of literary and physical forms in Hoccleve’s work and, more broadly, to our conception of form in the early fifteenth century?

Please send 250-word proposals to hocclevesociety@gmail.com by September 15, 2012.

Please join us for our inaugural sponsored session at Kalamazoo

Tradition and the Individual Hoccleve

3:30pm, Saturday, May 12, 2012

Fetzer 1005

Organizer and Presider: Sebastian J. Langdell (Oxford University)

Presenters:

Amanda Walling (University of Hartford) — To Know A Poem’s Heart: Fidelity and Tradition in the Letter of Cupid

Elisabeth Kempf (Freie Universität Berlin) — “That text I undirstonde thus alwey”: Hoccleve, Feminism and Metatextuality

Erica R. Machulak (University of Notre Dame) — Insomnia in Hoccleve’s Series

Cristina Pangilinan (Vanderbilt University) — Thomas Hoccleve’s Social Life

Session abstract:

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone…You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Critics have long set Thomas Hoccleve among the dead, reading him in the light of Chaucer and — to a lesser extent — Gower. Hoccleve invites contrast and comparison with these predecessors by memorializing them in his Regiment of Princes. While we might follow Eliot by asking what the “individual Hoccleve” brings to what critics often call the Chaucerian tradition, we might also follow Eliot by asking how this English literary past is directed and altered by a Hocclevian present. For instance, how “Hocclevian” is the version of Chaucer we see depicted in the Regiment? Where does Hoccleve draw from his predecessors and where does he re-create them in his own image? Recent Hoccleve scholarship has illuminated the ways in which Hoccleve acts not as a passive recipient of literary and artistic models, but rather as an innovator and instigator: John Bowers has credited Hoccleve with creating the “first collected poems in English”; Derek Pearsall associates Hoccleve with the “invention” of English portraiture; Ethan Knapp finds in Hoccleve “the dramatic first stirrings of vernacular autobiography”; and Bernard O’Donoghue sees “the earliest and inchoate exponent of a mixed kind of writing that is found up to the early Elizabethans…drawing on conventional frameworks and apparently real experiences at the same time.” With this succession of “firsts,” a different picture of Hoccleve emerges: a Hoccleve who proves not only useful for his connection to “the dead,” but indeed capable of creating new possibilities for the composition and preservation of English poetry.

This session invites papers that explore the tension and interplay between “tradition and the individual Hoccleve”: What does the poet bring to the poetic tradition that he works to establish? How does Hoccleve “make it new”? How does the poet play the temporal against the timeless, the contemporary against the conventional? We invite speakers to draw on any of Hoccleve’s works when considering these questions and, equally, to consider Hoccleve’s various roles as scribe, poet, and Privy Seal clerk. We also invite speakers to consider how Hoccleve draws and distinguishes himself from other traditions, whether literary, cultural, artistic, or ecclesiastical. What of his connection to the French poetic tradition, for instance, and to poets like Pizan, Deschamps, and Machaut? What of the less well-charted waters of Hoccleve’s potential connections to Langland? What new literary and textual compounds catalyze, react, and materialize in the hands of an individual Hoccleve?