Hoccleve’s “Regiment of Princes”: Counsel and Constraint by Nicholas Perkins (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER think about both works, and their audiences, at the same time. It is an interesting and enlightening exercise. Edgar Laird Texas State University Nicholas Perkins. Hoccleve’s ‘‘Regiment of Princes’’: Counsel and Constraint . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Pp. xi, 235. $60.00. The Hoccleve industry is certainly thriving, as this fine book by Nicholas Perkins shows. Through the Regiment, Perkins addresses the problems of counsel in late medieval advisory literature: the status of its intervention in the political sphere, the risks and ruses of telling truth to the powerful. The topic itself is familiar enough, and indeed Perkins’s intellectually generous study is openly set in a frame established by other recent commentators, such as David Lawton, Judith Ferster, and James Simpson. At the same time, Perkins’s own approach, grounded in several professional disciplines, brings a new and rewarding perspective to bear on Hoccleve’s poem. As his title suggests, Perkins sees the Regiment as a careful endeavor to negotiate a way past the ‘‘regulation of language in late-medieval England’’ (p. 5). His opening chapter sketches the linguistic constraints operating in various domains across the social scale, from the relationships of ‘‘hierarchy and accommodation’’ (p. 24), which structure the household, to the ‘‘dual axis of common representation and hierarchical engagement,’’ which ‘‘makes the language of parliamentary exchange particularly sensitive to interpretation and audience’’ (p. 29). Perkins, drawing both on Simpson and on the historical work of John Watts, notes a correlation between the political community’s desire to direct the king’s will without diminishing his power, and ‘‘the medieval understanding of educational or philosophical reading, in which the will is ‘informed’ by the rational and imaginative faculties of the soul’’ (p. 60). The result, in the Regiment, is a text that gains access to political discourse by actively thematizing royal reading and interpretation, constantly testing the king’s exegetical alertness against the imposing weight of a didactic tradition that can always turn a bad king into yet another embarrassing exemplum. Chapter 2 considers the poem as a PAGE 418 418 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:49 PS REVIEWS highly self-conscious series of reflections on the matter of counsel and reading. Chapter 3 shows Hoccleve unfolding a dialogic potential in the work’s sources, and so soliciting yet more hermeneutic agility from its imagined royal reader. Perkins makes in passing a case for Jacobus de Cessolis’s De ludo scaccorum as the Regiment’s most significant source. Chapter 4 tackles the question of the figuration of bodies (both royal and subject) in the poem, and the book closes with a discussion of the manuscripts, identifying patterns of codicological grouping and ownership , and noting some fascinating aspects of annotation and generic affiliation . Perkins’s thoughtful exploration—to the richness of whose detail it is impossible to do justice here—provides an intriguing, and often avowed, counter to Larry Scanlon’s comments on the poem from the early 1990s. Where Scanlon argued that Hoccleve’s poetic sophistication runs alongside a fair degree of ideological assent, for Perkins the same reflexiveness is the measure of Hoccleve’s desire to make a difference . His critical claims, too, are bolstered by a grasp of the Latin sources and manuscript contexts that earns much respect. There is no sense, as there can be in some recent writing on the materiality of the text, that the gathering of evidence has borne only a superficial relationship to an agenda already decided. Perkins’s skills here are the real deal, and we can be grateful. With all its virtues, the book perhaps follows one current fashion a little too dedicatedly. While Hoccleve studies have broadened spectacularly of late, the version of Hoccleve often presented is rather narrow. Hoccleve, the professional cleric confronting big historical forces with a combination of rhetorical command and material debility, is an attractive figure to academic readers, and he has as a result had to bear a good deal of critical projection. There is much demand for a Hoccleve who is thoroughly, consciously, and purposefully on the offensive, whether against nasty Lancastrians, creeping bureaucracy, or a depressingly uniform Middle Ages. Promoters of this...