Abstract

With historicism on the wane, now is a good time to reexamine Thomas Hoccleve’s politics. The resurgence of interest in Hoccleve coincided with the advent of critical historicism in Middle English scholarship. Debate on Hoccleve has been sharply divided between those who see him as a royalist and those who see him as politically unaligned. Analysis of Hoccleve’s persona in the Regiment of Princes—the most poetically prominent feature of his most important political poem—and its relation to the figure of Fortune demonstrates that, if anything, ideological readings of Hoccleve have underplayed his royalism.

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