The Lollard Society

There is a newly formed International Hoccleve Society, and they are offering this Call for Papers for Kalamazoo this coming year: proposals are due by September 15th.

“Tradition and the Individual Hoccleve”: a Session for the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, May 10-13, 2012, sponsored by The International Hoccleve Society

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. . . . You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Critics have long set Thomas Hoccleve among the dead, reading him in the light of Chaucer and — to a lesser extent — Gower. Hoccleve invites contrast and comparison with these predecessors by memorializing them in his Regiment of Princes. While we might follow Eliot by asking what the “individual Hoccleve” brings to what critics often call the Chaucerian tradition, we might also follow Eliot by asking how this English literary past is directed and altered by a Hocclevian present. For instance, how “Hocclevian” is the version of Chaucer we see depicted in the Regiment? Where does Hoccleve draw from his predecessors and where does he re-create them in his own image? Recent Hoccleve scholarship has illuminated the ways in which Hoccleve acts not as a passive recipient of literary and artistic models, but rather as an innovator and instigator: John Bowers has credited Hoccleve with creating the “first collected poems in English”; Derek Pearsall associates Hoccleve with the “invention” of English portraiture; Ethan Knapp finds in Hoccleve “the dramatic first stirrings of vernacular autobiography”; and Bernard O’Donoghue sees “the earliest and inchoate exponent of a mixed kind of writing that is found up to the early Elizabethans . . . drawing on conventional frameworks and apparently real experiences at the same time.” With this succession of “firsts,” a different picture of Hoccleve emerges: a Hoccleve who proves not only useful for his connection to “the dead,” but indeed capable of creating new possibilities for the composition and preservation of English poetry.

This session invites papers that explore the tension and interplay between “tradition and the individual Hoccleve”: What does the poet bring to the poetic tradition that he works to establish? How does Hoccleve “make it new”? How does the poet play the temporal against the timeless, the contemporary against the conventional? We invite speakers to draw on any of Hoccleve’s works when considering these questions and, equally, to consider Hoccleve’s various roles as scribe, poet, and Privy Seal clerk. We also invite speakers to consider how Hoccleve draws and distinguishes himself from other traditions, whether literary, cultural, artistic, or ecclesiastical. What of his connection to the French poetic tradition, for instance, and to poets like Pizan, Deschamps, and Machaut? What of the less well-charted waters of Hoccleve’s potential connections to Langland? What new literary and textual compounds catalyze, react, and materialize in the hands of an individual Hoccleve?

Please submit proposals for 20-minute papers to Sebastian Langdell, Oxford University, by September 15 along with a PIF form (available here on the Congress website).

The theme of Leeds 2012 is “Rules to Follow (or Not),” which should dovetail beautifully with sessions about lollards. Submitters might especially look at the last “area of discussion” that Leeds proposes to define their topic: “Modalities of creating, adapting, legitimating, proclaiming, enforcing, transferring, transgressing, overriding and/or resisting rules.”

Sessions at Leeds need to be submitted complete, with paper titles and presenters. If submitters have ideas for individual papers, however, Mishtooni Bose will take your individual titles, collate them into sessions, and contact speakers if people submit individual titles to her by September 23rd.

The info she needs is:

Speaker’s name, title and affiliation (please state if a postgraduate student)
Full address (including FAX and email)
Paper Title
Equipment (if needed) – state if you need slide, data or overhead projector and/or other equipment

Please contact Mishtooni Bosewith any further questions.

Here are the sessions we hope to offer next year; the Congress will be on May 10-13.

Next year, all three Lollard Society panels will emphasize comparative study – between disciplines, across the supposed divide between medieval and early modern culture, and between thinkers and movements that have in the past been embedded in particular national histories rather than viewed as parts of a larger picture.

1. Historiographies of Feeling Those engaged in historical study, just as much as anthropologists, are attracted to theories of emotion that emphasize difference and change. It seems obvious to us that even if there are some basic continuities in human affect, nonetheless how people express emotion, how they value and interpret it, and even what it is they feel vary considerably in ways that may on the one hand be broadly shared, or on the other, highly specific—to a narrow historical window, a locale, a community, even a genre of writing or performance. This session invites papers that consider how we write about emotions in the past, as well as how we can investigate the ways people in the past understood and expressed their feelings. Papers addressing lollard writings and papers considering other writers or movements for which similar questions arise are equally welcome. Papers might address continuities or influences between times or places, or focus on a particular example.

2. Religious Practice Scholars used to think of “heresy” and “orthodoxy” as fundamentally opposed to one another over doctrinal issues, and of course in the minds of some schoolmen, bishops, and inquisitors, they were. However, we have come to understand that most people did not experience the religion that formed part of their daily life in anything like this way. Rather than sharply demarcated spheres, both orthodoxy in all its variety and religious movements or trends that might be labelled as heresy (but did not perceive themselves in this way) participated in a range of shared and overlapping practices. Invited for this session are papers that focus on religious practice as a means for considering cultural change, the nature of orthodoxy, popular religion, etc. Papers need not focus on late medieval England, or on lollardy: comparative range would be welcome.

3. Influence or Interchange? Vernacular and Scholarly Cultures in the Fifteenth Century It is now a commonplace that late medieval scholastic thought passed into the vernacular while it circulated in Latin, and lollardy has long provided an example of how not just intellectual content but also a range of scholarly habits of reading and bookmaking and argumentation might be transmitted from the academy to vernacular culture. Yet among the materials remaining to us, any vernacular text containing scholarly content, any vernacular book displaying scholarly habits of annotation and production, and any evidence of popular thought and practice (e.g., within heresy trial depositions, or narrative accounts) will demand that we think beyond a simple, one-way transmission from “the schools” to “the people.” This session invites thoughtful analyses of interchange, as well as influence, between vernacular and scholarly cultures.

To submit a proposal, or for any further questions, please get in touch with Fiona Somerset (somerset [at] duke [dot] edu).