Title: The bureaucratic muse : Thomas Hoccleve and the literature of late medieval England /
Authors: Knapp, Ethan, 1966-
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press,
Year: 2001
Subjects: Hoccleve, Thomas, Criticism and interpretation.; Great Britain. History; Literature and society England History; Bureaucracy Great Britain History; Scriptoria England History; Civilization, Medieval, in literature
Abstract: "In The Bureaucratic Muse, Ethan Knapp investigates the connections between Hoccleve's poetic corpus and his life as a clerk of the Privy Seal. The early fifteenth century was a watershed moment in the histories of both centralized bureaucracy and English vernacular literature. These were the decades in which Chaucer's experiments in a courtly English poetry were rendered into a stable tradition and in which the central writing offices at Westminster emerged from personal government into the full-blown modernity of independent civil service. Knapp shows the importance of Hoccleve's poetry as a site where these two histories come together. By following the shifting relationship between the texts of vernacular poetry and those of bureaucratic documents, Knapp argues that the roots of vernacular fiction reach back into the impersonal documentary habits of a bureaucratic class." "The Bureaucratic Muse, the first full-length study of Hoccleve since 1968, provides an authoritative historical and textual treatment of this important but underappreciated writer. Chapters focus on Hoccleve's importance in consolidating key concepts of the literary field such as autobiography, religious heterodoxy, gendered identity, and post-Chaucer textuality. This book will be of interest to scholars of Middle English literature, autobiography, gender studies, and the history of literary institutions."--Jacket.
Contents: Bureaucratic identity and the construction of the self in Hoccleve's Formulary and "La male regle" -- The letter of Cupid: gender and the foundations of poetic authority -- "Wrytynge no travaille is": scribal labor in the Regement of princes -- Eulogies and usurpations: father Chaucer in the Regement of princes -- Hoccleve and heresy: image, memory and the vanishing mediator -- "Ful bukkissh is his brayn": writing, madness, and bureaucratic culture in the Series.