Hoccleve Society

We are delighted to invite you to the next Hoccleve at Home event, featuring Charlotte Ross of Oxford University:

Charlotte Ross (Oxford University) 

“‘Unto yow compyle I this sentence’: the Paratexts of The Regiment of Princes“

Monday, November 18 at 1:30pm Central (2:30pm Eastern, 7:30pm UK & Ireland, 4:30am KST/JST)

If you’re not on our mailing list, contact hocclevesociety@gmail.com for the Zoom link.

Mark your calendars for two upcoming Hoccleve at Home events:

Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University) 

“Hoccleve’s Ethiopians: Black Faces, Disability, Metaphor”

Friday, October 25 at 1pm Central (2pm Eastern, 7pm UK & Ireland)

This paper explores Hoccleve’s preoccupation with the human face and its implications for theorizing race and disability. The first section traces Hoccleve’s considerations of the human face—as a somatic feature, and as a metaphor—within a medieval English literary context, putting his historical reflections on embodied difference into conversation with critical disability studies. The second section turns to race—specifically, medieval constructions of blackness—to unmask the unmarked status of whiteness in Hoccleve’s work. The final section integrates race and disability, posing new questions for Hoccleve and Middle English studies. This discussion incorporates concepts of disability as “narrative prosthesis” in literary criticism, as well as studies of metaphor as a historical race-making process, and it ends by suggesting future intersectional and global approaches to Hoccleve’s poetics.

If you’re not on our mailing list, contact hocclevesociety@gmail.com for the Zoom link.

And please save the date for our next event! We are delighted to host Charlotte Ross (Oxford) for a talk on Monday, November 18. Details forthcoming.

We are very sorry to report that our dear friend and colleague Dr. Jenni Nuttall has passed away. Jenni has been ill for some months, and she passed away at the end of last week.

Our thoughts go out to her husband Jon and daughter Molly. Her death is a source of great sadness and shock to all of us.

Jenni was a much respected scholar, teacher and member of the English Faculty and Exeter College communities at Oxford. Their reflections attest to her importance as a researcher, teacher, and public-facing scholar. Jenni was a longtime and tireless supporter of the work of the Hoccleve Society, most recently in co-organizing the inaugural society conference in 2018 and co-editing the volume that proceeded from the conference (both with David Watt). Several of the modern English translations available on the Hoccleve Society website are her work, which she made freely available for Hoccleve scholars, and she was among the first to speak for our “Hoccleve at Home” online seminars and helped us successfully launch the series.

We are deeply saddened by the news and will miss her a great deal.

Someone knocked very hard at my chamber door
And shouted loudly, ‘Hey, Hoccleve! Are you here?
Open your door! I think it’s been a really long time
Since I saw you last. Listen, my friend, for God’s sake,
Come out, for I haven’t seen you this last three months
As far as I know,’ and so I came out to see him…

Dr. Jenni Nuttall continues her translation of Hoccleve’s Series into modern English with a verse translation of its second constituent part, the “Dialogue,” now freely available here. You can view other open-access texts and translations on the Texts page of this website.

If you use these resources in your teaching or research, we’d love to hear about it! You can contact the IHS at hocclevesociety@gmail.com or directly reach out to our organizers.