As part of an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary research project, ‘Identification of the Scribes Responsible for Copying Major Works of Middle English Literature’, this thesis re-examines the late medieval poet Thomas Hoccleve in the context of his career as a clerk of the Privy Seal and the history of the late medieval English government administration. Through identification of Hoccleve’s handwriting, it has been possible to search for all the extant documents produced by him for that office now in the National Archives. The evidence drawn from these documents is used to contribute towards a more complete chronology of the poet’s life, and the circumstances under which his poetry was written. Firstly, Hoccleve is used as a case study through which to examine the development of the late medieval English government administration and civil service, and the changing nature of its staff during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Secondly, Hoccleve’s major work, the Regiment of Princes, is examined in the context of his role as a royal clerk, and the proliferation of Middle English political and didactic texts during this period. Finally, the impact of Hoccleve’s use of Anglo-French in official documents and Middle English in his poetry is considered in the context of the mutual culture of influence existing between the two languages. These different approaches to the documentary evidence are used to illustrate the impact of Hoccleve’s position at the Privy Seal on the form and content of his literary work.

This thesis considers the intersection of the manuscript and its literature through an examination of the late fifteenth century manuscript, Chetham’s Library 8009 (Mun. A.6.31) and provides four diplomatic editions. This manuscript contains fourteen texts in Middle English including romance, hagiography, courtesy literature, and a comic text. This thesis argues for the importance of reading medieval literature in its manuscript context. Although there is a growing trend to consider the ‘whole book’ and integrate analysis of the material artefact with interpretation, much work remains to be done. In Part I, this thesis presents a new paradigm for reading medieval literature, and argues that the manuscript forms a very literal community of texts, and that each text acts as a co-creator of meaning with the others. It then demonstrates four brief contextual readings that may be made within Chetham 8009 across generic boundaries, and that produce a shift in interpretive focus . Part II provides four diplomatic editions from Chetham 8009: the Life of St Katherine, the Liber Catonis, John Russell’s Book of Carving and Nurture, and the Book of the Duke and Emperor. This thesis aims to contribute to the study of medieval literature by arguing for a methodological shift in the way the literature is approached and by providing access to four texts either previously unedited or not easily accessible.

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Although the importance of music to the development of early medieval poetry has long been recognised, surviving musical notations have rarely been identified and only occasionally analysed. One reason for this neglect is the absence of a readily identifiable <I>corpus</I> of notated poetry. In the absence of a uniform body of material, attention is directed in this study towards one type of manuscript in which notated poetry was transmitted; that is, poetic collections. In total, six notated poetic collections written before the eleventh century are identified as primary material for research. In selecting for investigation both a topic (early medieval verse and music) and a medium (poetic collections), a twofold enquiry is pursued. First, potential uses and users of the surviving notations are assessed. This entails a consideration of notation as, on the one hand, one among several activities involved in the collection and presentation of verse on the page, and, on the other, a witness to the later reception of poetic collections. The particular selections and presentations of text and notation in the individual collections are accordingly analysed as written representations of early medieval music and verse with their own rationale and audience. Through this assessment of the writing of individual manuscripts, a spectrum of uses for and users of the neumatic notations is proposed. Second, surviving notations are analysed as representations of sounding structures. Although the information provided by the neumatic notation cannot be transcribed into a modern format, the information transmitted by the neumes is analysed in conjunction with the poetic texts. Two forms of analysis are undertaken: a comparison of surviving notations for textual concordances, and a comparison of notations for similar text structures. On the basis of these analyses, characteristic melodic behaviours are identified and new models for the interaction of music and poetry proposed. The notations and texts for these analyses are presented separately in a second volume, which contains reproductions, transcriptions and commentaries of the thirty-nine poems in the six poetic collections, as well as reproductions and transcriptions of notations for concordant texts transmitted outside these collections.

The thesis explores the role of violence and wounding in English satire before the Refonnation. From the analysis of medieval commentary on Juvenal and Horace, and depictions of wounding in medieval culture, a new understanding of satiric aggression is derived. It is suggested that satire and mutilation are connected by their common sense of ambivalence. During the Middle Ages both were invested with two distinct functions: each could enforce a given system of standards and definitions, or be used to dissolve such a system. While this dualism makes disfigurement a natural emblem for satire, it also means that wounding invariably brings to light discrepancies when it. is portrayed in satiric texts. Its flexibility serves to exacerbate the tensions present in the mode. The thesis thus treats injury not only as a central motif in satire, but as a point at which implicit conflicts emerge most clearly. Wounding is used as a means of distinguishing points of friction in the literature. These ideas are applied to the two main traditions of Middle English satire, anticlericalism and antifeminism. In both cases, the ruptures in texts are closely analysed. These in turn are used to identify inconsistencies in medieval culture more widely. The thesis seeks to redress two critical oversights. Firstly, the dual nature of medieval satire has never been explicitly theorised. While the genre's two facets have been examined individually, their coexistence has never been fully investigated. Secondly, vernacular satire is itself an tinder-explored field. Although several studies of Middle English satire exist, these often conflate the literature with unrelated types of text, or reduce English works to echoes of twelfth-century Latin satire. This study treats medieval vernacular satire as an art-form in its own right, with its own unique concerns and complexities.

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