Long
neglected as a marginal and eccentric figure, Thomas Hoccleve (1367-1426)
wrote some of the most sophisticated and challenging poetry of the
late Middle Ages. Full of gossip and autobiographical detail, his
work has made him immensely useful to modern scholars, yet Hoccleve
the poet has remained decidedly in the shadow of Geoffrey Chaucer.
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.
