Hoccleve's Compleint And Dialogus Amico Analysis

“None arrest, but all brain-seke”
Protest Psychosis in Hoccleve’s Compleint and Dialogus cum amico

Medievalists do not often think they have much in common with those who teach the literature of the Civil Rights movement. But then I read Jonathan Metzl’s Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease and I wondered how a medievalist might use the central theme of his book. Metzl’s thesis, distilled from decades of medical records at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, is that by the mid- to late-1960s, schizophrenia was a diagnosis disproportionately applied to the hospital's growing population of African American men from urban Detroit. Perhaps the most shocking evidence Metzl uncovered was that hospital charts
Hoccleve, (1368–1426), was a poet and Clerk of the Privy Seal. As a man desiring the benediction of the church while remaining in the outermost orbit of the king’s court, Hoccleve wrote secular and religious poetry. By embedding a freeplay of secular and religious in his textuality, Hoccleve attempted to create a liminal space for himself in what was, in the early fifteenth century, an impenetrable boundary—a secular man who had religious authority. His failure to create that space for himself made him, in his own words, “brayn-seke.” However, through his process of mental illness and recovery, Hoccleve finds his authentic voice not as a religious scholar or courtly toady or some différance therein. In his poems My Compleint, and Dialogus cum amico, Hoccleve carves out a dissenting space as someone who questions and challenges how the mentally ill were treated in his lifetime. In doing so, the poet encourages us to ask new questions of a society that adhered to a highly exclusionary idea of political and psychological normality. In doing so, he prefigures the social model of disability studies by nearly 500
While physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychological variations may cause individual functional limitation or impairments, these do not have to lead to disability unless society fails to take account of and include people regardless of their individual differences (106). In other words, it is society’s inability to expand and accept that makes a disability.
Turning now to Hoccleve, specifically his Compleint and Dialogus cum amico, we can use the five point framework of the social model of disability studies to analyze perhaps how he became mentally ill and then how he turned his mental illness into social