Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue ed J. A. Burrow (review)

REVIEWS Marie Marchand, and Joerg O. Fichte, but the final essay I want to discuss is by Robert F. Yeager, who considers ‘‘the history of the body as metaphor’’ (p. 146). The essay’s sharpest focus, however, is on the Westminster chronicler’s account of the early days of the 1381 English Rising. Yeager considers accounts of the execution of Simon Sudbury and later, of Wat Tyler, to show how the politicians, the rebels, and the chroniclers were all ‘‘to a man’’ deeply conscious of how the body— especially the executed body—works ‘‘as an unavoidable referential in complex but ultimately political ways’’ (p. 155), and to affirm that all the participants were interpreting these texts according to the same social scheme. Like some of the strongest essays in this collection, this essay lifts the discussion of medieval ‘‘body and soul’’ out of a purely philosophical realm and rewrites that discussion as a matter of medieval bodies and medieval souls, across a range of important political, spiritual , social, and textual contexts. Stephanie Trigg University of Melbourne J. A. Burrow, ed. Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue. Early English Text Society, o.s., vol. 313. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. lxx, 140. $65.00. If the study of the poet and Privy Seal clerk, Thomas Hoccleve, is now undergoing a minor renaissance, the credit is largely due to a series of groundbreaking essays in which John Burrow argued so persuasively for the historical interest and intellectual weight of this sometimes neglected poet. In recent years, the growing interest in the Lancastrian court has helped bring Hoccleve out of obscurity and into consideration as a poet of some importance in the project of sketching the cultural history of the later Middle Ages in England. Despite this new interest, however, the study of his verse has been hampered by the aging and inadequate Early English Text Society [hereafter EETS] volumes that remain the only source of complete texts for his major works. Frederick Furnivall’s late-nineteenth-century EETS volumes were reissued in 1970 with revisions by Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle, but the texts and apparatus, even in the revised volume, were limited by Furnivall’s origi529 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:04 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER nal decision to rely very heavily on single base manuscripts for the major works (using British Library MS Harley 4866 for the Regement of Princes and Durham University Library MS Cosin V.iii.9 for the Series). The lack of a reliable modern edition of the Regement has been remedied by Charles Blyth’s recent edition of this work for the TEAMS series. It is the aim of Burrow’s admirable new edition to complete this task for the Series. The intent of this new edition is not to replace Furnivall’s earlier volume but rather to supplement it for the first two, most problematic, sections of the poem. Hoccleve’s so-called Series is, of course, a group of five linked poems given the title of the Series in 1927 by Eleanor Hammond . Burrow’s new edition includes the first two of these (the ‘‘Complaint ’’ and ‘‘Dialogue with a Friend’’). Burrow’s decision to reedit only these first two sections is based upon what he calls the ‘‘peculiar challenge ’’ (p. xvii) presented by their texts. Though the Series survives in a largely holographic copy, the Durham MS, the holograph portion of this manuscript was damaged at some stage by the removal of two quires— those containing the ‘‘Complaint’’ and a substantial portion of the ‘‘Dialogue with a Friend.’’ This loss was subsequently amended by the antiquarian John Stow, who supplied the missing lines in a transcription made from another source. Furnivall chose to use Stow’s transcription as the authority for his own edition, creating a text of the Series that was thus based partly on a holograph and partly on a poor, and stemmatically distant, scribal text. Burrow sets out to amend this defect by offering a new version of the ‘‘Complaint’’ and ‘‘Dialogue,’’ a version based not on the faulty Stow transcription but on a reconstruction of a Variant Original for the...