The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt (review)

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Reviewed by: The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt Elon Lang The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” By David Watt. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2013. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo14387537.html In The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” David Watt takes on one of Middle English literary scholarship’s persistent interpretive challenges: to characterize the thematic and formal unity in the sequence of disparate poems and other texts by the early fifteenth-century London poet Thomas Hoccleve that modern scholars simply dub the Series. Characterizing this compilation has been complicated by Hoccleve’s bibliographic record, which includes four surviving holograph manuscripts, one of which preserves a copy of the whole Series in Hoccleve’s own hand. Scholars have long been interested in the Series because of its pseudo-autobiographical narrative frame, in which a first person narrator named Thomas discusses the process of composing

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