Expanding Perspectives on Hoccleve and Gender

A Session of Papers at the 2025 International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, sponsored by the International Hoccleve Society

In his notoriously laddish introduction to The Minor Poems,Frederick Furnivall wishes that Thomas Hoccleve had been “a manlier fellow.” Furnivall’s judgment reflects straitened Victorian gender norms that have little to do with medieval reality. But Hoccleve’s relationship to masculinity, femininity, and the gender politics of his own era remains an open question in criticism.

This panel invites reconsiderations of Hoccleve and gender. We welcome papers that revisit topics long debated by Hoccleveans: his relationship to Christine de Pizan as author, for instance, and the changes his Letter of Cupid makes to Christine’s L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours; his women patrons and readers; his flirtations with misogynist discourse; his Marian devotion; his account of his marriage as impediment to his career; or his role in inventing a patrilineal model of English literary succession. We also invite papers that find new vantage points on Hoccleve and gender, however, including studies of the intersections of gender and class; the gendering of mental illness; gender performance in and via Hoccleve’s writing; the homosociality of the Privy Seal; and currents of identification, embodiment, and/or desire that have thus far been overlooked. Papers that draw on trans studies, intersectional feminist thought, and new documentary insights about medieval gender are particularly welcome.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a completed Participant Information Form, to Arwen Taylor (ataylor52@atu.edu) and Spencer Strub (spencer.strub@princeton.edu), by September 15, 2024.