This volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right.

Thomas Hoccleve was born in 1367 and entered government service as clerk in the office of the Privy Seal in 1387, an office that he held until his death in 1426. His earliest datable poem (the Epistle of Cupid, a free translation of Christine de Pisan's Epistre au Dieu d'Amour) was completed about 1402. The Regiment of Princes, written about 1410-11, was composed at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II. Essentially it is addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance, but it exhibits considerable generic instability and thus raises fundamental questions about how we should understand the tone of considerable portions of the poem. For all the problems it presents, The Regiment shows that Hoccleve has strengths as a poet. At times he could be a very talented prosodist. In autobiographical sections of the poem he creates a most interesting early-modern subjectivity. He has distinctive observations to make about his time, and, in his self-critical awareness, probes the limits of what is means to be a poet writing in the wake of Chaucer.

Offers a significant new reading of the late medieval poet Thomas Hoccleve, illustrating Hoccleve's role in recasting Chaucer as a figure of intellectual and moral authority, and situating Hoccleve - and the nascent English literary tradition - firmly in the context of heresy and religious reform.

Thomas Hoccleve's Series, written c.1420 was edited for EETS in 1892. This is a new edition of the first two sections and glosses the poems more fully than before. The introduction presents new findings about Hoccleve, whose poems have attracted much attention in recent years.

Thomas Hoccleve (d.1426) served four kings as a clerk of the Privy Seal. His poetry, partly written under Chaucer's influence, includes the Regiment of Princes on the nature of kingship and some delightful occasional pieces. This documentary life is based on several years' study and offers a fresh interpretation of the poet; few Middle English writers can be so fully understood in the context within which they worked. This study includes new material and an up-to-date bibliography of manuscripts and printed material. John Burrow is Winterstoke Professor of English at Bristol University.

This study conceives of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (1410-1413) as an essentially performative text, one that expresses its awareness of the manuscript culture in which it is so firmly rooted. The openness of manuscripts is a recurring subject in the Regement and is not only expressed through mere descriptions of, but through complex references to this manuscript context. Performances of manuscript culture manifest themselves in several aspects of the text. The first is the narrator persona, and especially the question of how persona and text are intertwined. The second is the constantly recurring interpretation of quotes from authoritative sources that pervades the Regement. This urge to interpret is expressed both in the tradition of adding marginal glosses and in the process of subjecting the text to an exegetical reading. The third aspect is the relation between text and images in the Regement’s manuscripts, which shows how mediality is performed and how the manuscript context is made the focus of this performance. In this monograph, all of these aspects are studied in a mindset that combines the concept of performativity with the postulations of Material Philology.