Thomas Hoccleve Essay

When we think of Thomas Hoccleve, if we think of him at all, we think of a slightly mad Chaucer hanger-on who never missed an opportunity to use his Chaucer cover band rhyming skills to beg for money. This But this received tradition about Hoccleve overlooks the fascinating and disquieting ways the poet plays with gender and queer identities and how these problematic identities interest with fifteenth century justice and law. Though described by Hoccleve in other poems as “most mighty king,” in Au Roy Hoccleve repurposes legal and Marian language, replicating in the king, the Virgin’s generative and maternal functions. He (re)genders Henry V as a merciful and bountiful intercessor, and works his established lexicon of Marian lyric language to petition the king not for grace or salvation, but for money. Ultimately, Hoccleve, celebrates the possibilities of feminine gender performance while problematizing that gendered identity as embedded in the masculine body politic where the King/Virgin dispenses justice. My talk today is part of a longer work, however, today I will have time to focus on the gendered implications of Marian lexicon, the legal
As Gwilym Dodd says in her book Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance, the legal language of petitioning conformed to a set of linguistic norms that limited the scope of expression on the part of the petitioner (108). No one told that to Thomas Hoccleve. In Au Roy, Hoccleve seeks to establish his own normative need and the authority of the king/virgin. Only the language of the law could allow him to do so. The surface structure of the poem enforces common law that was dependent on a centralized bureaucracy. Legal language functioned because of its normative homogeneity. Yet the power of legal language resides in the institutional conditions of their production and reception. In short, the language of the law was, on its surface, not a place for queering