Thomas Hoccleve’s Collected Shorter Poems

Thomas Hoccleve produced the first author-curated 'collected poems' in the English language, preserved in two complementary manuscripts: Huntington Library, MSS HM 111 and HM 744 (copied 1422-26). This is the first full modern edition of these poems. The twenty-eight pieces span Hoccleve's entire career: they range from stirring devotional verse, to playful autobiography, deft translations of Latin and French texts, and timely political verse. The collection comprises the entirety of Hoccleve's poetic corpus, save his two longer works, the Regiment of Princes and the Series. It includes some of Hoccleve's most celebrated and widely studied poems, including 'The Epistle of Cupid', 'La Male Regle', 'To Sir John Oldcastle', 'Complaint Paramount', 'Learn to Die', and 'The Court of Good Company'. This edition engages for the first time with newly identified sources of poems; it also offers comprehensive textual variants for the poems, a full up-to-date chronology, and explanatory notes that engage with the wealth of recent scholarship on Hoccleve – including newly discovered details about Hoccleve's life and the dates of his poems, his relationship with heresy and orthodox reform movements, and his positioning within London scribal circles and coterie readerships.

Sebastian J. Langdell is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Baylor University. He is the author of Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer (LUP 2018) and a founding member of the International Hoccleve Society. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in: New Medieval Literatures, Medium Aevum, Augustinian Studies, The Oxford History of Poetry in English, Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches, and the Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature.