Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer

This book explores the work of the late-medieval English writer Thomas Hoccleve. It highlights Hoccleves role, throughout his works, as a religious writer: an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels.

It suggests a role for Hoccleve as a poetic mediator, capable of mediating between the increasingly militant English church and an incipient English literary tradition, and it highlights Hoccleves role in transforming the figure of Chaucer in the first decades of the fifteenth century. It argues that the version of Chaucer presented in Hoccleves Regiment of Princes august, devout, and conspicuously religious is not a pre-formed artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention; and it indicates the ecclesiastical, political, and literary contexts that make this version of Chaucer both possible and necessary.

This study also situates Hoccleves accomplishments in a transnational poetic context offering French and Italian precedents for Hoccleves moralization of Chaucer, while examining the influence of contemporary French poetry on Hoccleves work. It positions us to reconsider Hoccleves role within English literary tradition, and to better understand the way heresy and religious reform surface in late medieval poetry; and it affords us a more nuanced context for Chaucers positioning as a literary 'father' figure in this period. See more