The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (review)

Reviews 239 Parergon 20.1 (2003) frame, its strength lies in various individual essays, in particular those of Dickinson and Sharpe, Rabin, Marland, Quinn, Andrews and Ward, which do indeed provide insightful studies of aspects of this interesting area of social history. Deborah Williams Faculty of Law/School of Humanities The University of Western Australia Knapp, Ethan, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001; cloth; pp. x, 210; RRP US$40.00; ISBN 0271021357. ‘It is, indeed, hard to image a form of literary history that would not be genealogical... In the assumed parthenogenesis of this tradition, the metaphor of paternity, the relation of fathers and sons, has always been central’ (p. 107). The same might be said of an author study that avoids the assumption of literariness and yet this is, precisely, Ethan Knapp’s intelligent and provocative strategem for reading Thomas Hoccleve’s literary works. Hoccleve’s career as a bureaucrat – a clerk – is central to, not excluded from, his production as a poetical writer. Knapp organises his study into six chapters that treat, in turn, Hoccleve’s major output. The Formulary is read both as autobiography and ‘an easily referenced collection of model documents’ (p. 31), and ‘La Male Regle’ (1405) because it ‘substantiates [the] links between bureaucratic practices and the construction of autobiography in Hoccleve’s verse’ (p. 36-7). His translation of Christine de Pisan’s L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours, known as the Letter of Cupid (1402), deploys Christine’s ‘radical critique of the prevailing connections between gender and authority’ (p. 50) but cannot replicate her authority of experience. Hoccleve’s problem is structurally, rather than ontologically, similar to hers. Hoccleve is one of the emergent lay class of clerics; furthermore, he is married; thus, ‘Hoccleve was not situated to speak for the established cultural traditions of either courtly verse [chevalerie] or clerkly didacticism [clergie]’ (p. 71). Knapp’s reading of the Regement of Princes (1410-1412) thematises two aspects of Hoccleve’s preoccupation with autobiography, or his use of textuality to represent selfhood. The poem is ‘a generic hybrid’: the first part (prologue) is ‘one of Hoccleve’s most typical compositions, the begging poem’ while the second section, ‘the Regement proper … constitutes the first example found in 240 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) English of that most popular of medieval genres, the mirror of princes’ (p. 81). Knapp first positions the Regement alongside John Carpenter’s Liber Albus (1419) to find ‘a vision of writing as a supplement to the fragile human body’ (p. 85). For Carpenter, no less than Hoccleve, ‘the bureaucratic technologies of writing’ offer, at once, a diagnostic occasion to lament the physical and mental costs of writing – ‘My bak unbuxum,’ ‘Stommak … whom stowpynge out of dreede/Annoyeth sore;’ ‘oure yen/ Upon the whyte mochil sorwe dryen,’ the imperative to ‘knytte/… Mynde, ye, and hand’ – and – ‘the promise of a victory over time and age’ (p. 90-92). Knapp argues that Hoccleve uses this promise to reject the Boethian consolations traditionally invoked in such a context. Instead, ‘Hoccleve chooses to represent himself as having found consolation not in philosophy but in the impossible home of textuality’ (p. 106). This conclusion is at some distance from the ‘auspicious opportunity for the development of serious English propagandistic verse’ (p. 81) which, Knapp acknowledges, is the way literary history has usually read the Regement. Knapp’s position here is not to gainsay such a judgement but, more shrewdly, to suspend such readings by first attending to the Regement’s ‘traces of the Privy Seal’ (p. 83); thus the prologue is an integral – and compelling – part of the work rather than a distraction. Knapp is, I think, less persuasive in dealing with a second theme in the Regement which he considers in a chapter titled ‘Eulogies and Usurpations: Father Chaucer in the Regement of Princes’. While the argument makes the wellestablished New Historical move of reading the circulation of a textual trope in the trajectory of historical events – the antagonistic relation between Henrys IV and V provides a model for Hoccleve’s relation to Chaucer – this same move loosens Knapp...