Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 8123
  • Author(s)/Creator(s): Batt , Catherine.
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Gendered Patronage and the Metatextual in Thomas Hoccleve's Series
  • Source: Seeing Gender: Perspectives on Medieval Gender and Sexuality. Gender and Medieval Studies Conference, King's College, London, January 4-6, 2002.. 2002.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Conference Paper Abstract
  • Subject (See Also): Gender in Literature Hoccleve, Thomas, Poet- Dialogue with a Friend Hoccleve, Thomas, Poet- Letter of Cupid Literature- Verse Patronage, Literary
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: British Isles
  • Century: 15
  • Primary Evidence:
  • Illustrations:
  • Table:
  • Abstract: In the Dialogue with a Friend, part of the group of poems we call Hoccleve’s Series, the character Friend identifies as a provocative text, at which women have taken offence, the poet’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s (pro-woman) Epistre au dieu d’amours, made some twenty years earlier. I have argued elsewhere that Hoccleve deploys gender issues in his translation in order to substitute, for Christine’s interest in reworking the language of officialdom, an expression of his own anxieties about the relation of rhetoric and power. In the Dialogue, the (arguably fictive) female reception of this poem is central to a debate the Series holds about the status and interaction of authorial intention, reader-response, and patronage in literary productions. This paper builds on my earlier work on the feminine as hermeneutic in Hoccleve’s writings to examine what is at stake in the Series’ construction of a nexus of male and female readers, some historically identifiable – such as the Countess of Westmoreland, or Duke Humphrey of Gloucester – others unnamed, and reads its inscribed fictions of gendered responses both against what one can reconstruct of historical patronage, and in the context of how these fictions contribute to the shifting perspectives on the Series’ diverse narratives. [Reproduced by permission of the Gender and Medieval Studies Conference Organizers].
  • Related Resources:
  • Author's Affiliation: University of Leeds
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 2002.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: Not Available