²My Compleint" and Other Poems. By Thomas Hoccleve. Edited by Roger Ellis. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001. Pp. x + 293; 1 halftone frontispiece. $79.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts. Introduction by J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle. Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series, 19. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xl + 426; halftone images. $125.


The twentieth century ended on a high note for the formerly obscure Thomas Hoccleve. In 1999, complementing the ever-burgeoning number of scholarly articles on the poet, two new editions of his work appeared: John Burrow's EETS edition (o.s. 313) of Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue (the first two items in the multipart work known as the Series), and Charles Blyth's TEAMS edition of the 5463–line Regiment of Princes, Hoccleve's advice text (among other things) for Henry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales. Aimed, respectively, at scholarly and student audiences (though Blyth's Regiment is rapidly becoming the edition of choice among scholars as well), these two editions testify to Hoccleve's newly achieved status as a major late medieval English poet. The beginning of the twenty-first century suggests that this rather rapid elevation of literary stature has not yet reached its peak. Complementing two monographs devoted to the poet (Ethan Knapp's The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England and Nicholas Perkins's Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint, both of which appeared in 2001) are now Roger Ellis's edition of the complete Series (along with several important minor poems) and J. A. Burrow's and A. I. Doyle's facsimile of Hoccleve's autograph verse manuscripts.


Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Goshen College