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‘Why þat yee meeued been / can I nat knowe’: Autobiography, Convention, and Discerning $\textit{Doublenesse}$ in Thomas Hoccleve's $\textit{The Series}$

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

Atkinson, L 

Abstract

The secretary script of the Privy Seal looms large in the holographs of fifteenth-century clerk, Thomas Hoccleve—both in the written hand on the manuscript page, and the written-ness of his extraordinary quasi-autobiographical poetic productions. Most captivating, if little known, is Durham, University Library, MS Cosin V. iii. 9: witness to the verse collection known as The Series, in which disparate exemplary, confessional, and didactic texts are organised as the purported compositions of the ‘Thomas’ of the frame narrative. The stage seems set for an insight into medieval authorial anxiety, patronage, and even mental infirmity, of apparently unprecedented candour. Yet for all his disarming claims to ineloquence, insignificance, and (famously) ‘meetrynge amis’, Hoccleve is a poet creatively alive to the possibilities, and dangers, of self-identification. He adopts in his poetry the double visage of laureate, yet servant; public man, yet ostracised clerk. Though his speakers may really report autobiographical truths of the poet, the poet may frequently refer only to a namesake of himself—mediated through literary convention—in his speakers. Such is the focus of this article, which considers—adopting a narratologist vocabulary—Cosin V. iii. 9 as an example of a work, and artefact, that bears an almost Renaissance sense of the individual’s propensity to self-fashioning, but that is better encapsulated in a term of a distinctly medieval flavour, doublenesse. The discernment of such doublenesse, I suggest, offers a means of ascribing value to Hoccleve’s still neglected corpus that extends beyond historicism alone, and a pathway, perhaps, for an alternative view of literary authority in late medieval literature. In The Series, emotion is concealed behind convention, the maker behind his text; but despite Hoccleve’s diligent control over the words on the page, as for their interpretation by his audience, that, he must finally concede, ‘can I nat knowe’.

Description

Keywords

Thomas Hoccleve, The Series, Cosin V. iii. 9, autobiography, convention, Doublenesse

Journal Title

Neophilologus

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0028-2677
1572-8668

Volume Title

Publisher

Springer