Collaborative Scholarship and Pedagogy

The Hoccleve Archive engages students and teachers on two campuses, The University of Texas at Austin and Georgia State University, in the preservation of existing archival materials and in the creation of innovative new tools for teaching and textual study.

Digital Archive

The Archive comprises manuscript collation tables compiled during the last attempt to produce a complete critical edition of the Regiment of Princes, digital text files that were used in the first computer-aided analysis of Hoccleve’s holograph works, data from new textual analyses of Hoccleve’s works, and physical materials (both hard-copy and microform) formerly in the collection of Charles Blyth. Our goal is to make digital copies or facsimiles of all of these materials available publicly online via the University of Texas Digital Repository.

Open Access Research Tools

In addition to preservation and digitization of existing materials, the Hoccleve Archive project includes building new texts and tools designed to engage modern readers with Thomas Hoccleve’s literary and historical legacy. Reimagining the digital archive as a kind of new media scriptorium provides an opportunity to link our work as teachers, critics, editors, coders, and archivists into a network of scholarly practices that restores multimodality to old texts by using them to create new ones.

 

 

Image credit: Detail from the Lindisfarne Gospels (left) with “A moment of madness” by *Psycho Delia* on Flickr (right), cropped and used courtesy of a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License

Current Projects

The core of the archive consists of the physical and digital residues of the most recent attempt to produce a complete critical edition of the Regiment of Princes. Digitization and accession of this material into the University of Texas Digital Repository is ongoing. From this archival core, we are developing new digital texts and research tools to make Hoccleve’s work more accessible to scholars, teachers, and amateurs.

Image of Hoccleve's hand used courtesy of the Late Medieval English Scribes Project.

The Holograph Manuscripts

Using text files created by previous editors, Student Innovation Fellows at Georgia State University developed a working prototype of a complete digital edition of the poetry surviving in Hoccleve’s own hand in Huntington HM 744, Huntington HM 111, and Durham MS Cosin V.iii.9.

Detail from miniature of the author presenting his book to Henry V; from Thomas Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, England (2nd quarter of the fifteenth century), Royal 17. D. vi, f. 40r. From the British Library.

Collation Tables

Included in the archive’s physical holdings are approximately 6,000 photocopies or mimeographs of handwritten collation tables. Each table contains handwritten transcriptions of a line of the Regiment of Princes (or a gloss) as it appears in all extant manuscripts. These tables are now available as digital images from the University of Texas Digital Repository.

Detail from diagrams of the eclipse of the moon, English in origin, from British Library MS Arundel 347, f. 34.

Concordance of Time Referents

Building on work by Karen Smyth (University of East Anglia), the concordance is a searchable database of the numerous markings of time–“alternations of day and night, of the seasons, of birth to death, of wakefulness and sleep, of the lunar and solar phases”–in the Regiment of Princes. It is the result of a collaboration between Elon Lang and Mark Watts, who graduated from UT Austin in 2014 with a BS in computer science.

Detail of hand holding scales, origin England, from British Library MS Yates Thompson 13, f. 5.

The Formulary

Hoccleve’s Formulary contains the author’s personal compilation of more than 1,000 examples of legal documents for his use as a clerk of the Privy Seal. Helen Hickey (University of Melbourne) has transcribed more than 80% of the formulary. Hickey’s transcription is currently available as a downloadable Excel document, and we are in the process of converting it into an SQL database.

BL Arundel 38, f.37r (Detail of historiated initial capital 'h' framing crest of a lion and foliate border, below miniature of a crowned man and a kneeling man both holding a book, usually assumed to depict the presentation of the Regiment of Princes to its dedicatee, Henry V as Prince of Wales.)

Hoccleve's Lexicon

The HOCCLEX files are digital transcriptions of poetry from the holograph manuscripts, and they include information about the part of speech and Middle English root form for every word, in every line, of every poem. The HOCCLEX files are available for download as plain text files in their original markup format and in TEI-compliant XML. Student Innovation Fellows at Georgia State are working to integrate the lexicon with our digital edition of the holograph poetry.

 

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future.” ~ Jacques Derrida

 

A select bibliography of conference papers and publications discussing our work on the Hoccleve Archive is available here, on the “Papers and Publications” page.

 

 

 

 

“The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space).” ~ Walter Benjamin

Editors and Contributors

Elon Lang, PhD
General Editor | Curator

Lang is a lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts Humanities Programs and a former project archivist at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Washington University in St. Louis (2010) specializing in Thomas Hoccleve and late-medieval English literature. He is currently serving as the director of the International Hoccleve Society.

Robin Wharton, PhD
Editor | Technical Development Lead

Wharton is a lecturer in English at Georgia State University, specializing in rhetoric, composition, and digital pedagogy. She holds a law degree (1999) and a PhD in English with an emphasis in late-medieval English law and literature (2009) from the University of Georgia. Her publications have appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Hybrid Pedagogy.

Contributors

Helen Hickey (Univ. of Melbourne),  Karen Smyth (Univ. of East Anglia), Mark Watts (UT Austin), and the Student Innovation Fellows at Georgia State University: Rushita Mettu, Siva Kondeti, Dylan Ruediger, Ramsundar Sundarkumar, Sruthi Vuppala, Zane Blalock, Madison Hansberry, Jennifer Ly, Priyanka Tayi.

“Finally, I have to thank my immediate family, who have suffered the indignity of living with a reluctant editor of whose work they are not likely ever to reap the benefit.” ~ Charles Blyth