Some eighty years ago, H. C. Schulz published an article in Speculum identifying the London poet and Privy Seal clerk Thomas Hoccleve as the scribe of three manuscripts of his own poetry, these being Durham, University Library MS Cosin V. iii. 9, which transmits an imperfect copy of Hoccleve's Series, and San Marino, Huntington Library MSS 111 and 744, which transmit copies of the poet's shorter works. These books have been the focus of a good deal of critical attention for, as Burrow and Doyle note in the introduction to their facsimile edition of the manuscripts, modern readers now only rarely have the opportunity to study Middle English verse in copies that can confidently be identified as autographs, “carefully made […] and free from all suspicion of interference by scribal intermediaries.” Work on the Hoccleve autograph corpus is on-going. As well as identifying numerous examples of the poet's hand among surviving Privy Seal documents, Mooney has argued that London, British Library MS Royal 17 D. xviii is a copy of the poet's Regiment of Princes written in Hoccleve's own hand, but that view has not won universal acceptance. Taking a longer view, it may transpire that the Hoccleve autographs are less unusual than they currently seem. Manuscript scholars such as Volker Honemann, Astrid Houthuys, and Gilbert Ouy have for some time been applying pressure to the axiomatic notion of the rarity of literary autograph manuscripts in Continental contexts, commenting that, as palaeographical methods are refined, ever more such manuscripts are likely to be identified. Still, in a literary culture in which authors did not typically flaunt any role that they played in the reproduction of their texts, one aspect of Hoccleve's work that will continue to differentiate him from the bulk of his contemporaries in England is his readiness to discuss his work as the scribe and compiler of his poetry within his poetry itself. This chapter addresses Hoccleve's conceptualization of his work as his own copyist and the significance that it assumed for the addressees and recipients of his books.

The argument begins with an account of the practical conditions of Hoccleve's self-publication, which was facilitated both by his professional scribal experience and by his connections to the London bookmaking milieu.