Dr Anne Scott's talk on speaking up for the aged in Thomas Hoccleve's advice to a medieval king in The Regiment of Princes will take place in the Reid Library on Tuesday, 14 October at 7:30.
Friends of the Library
Tuesday 14 October 2008 at 7:30pm for 8pm
Library Meeting Room
Ground Floor
Reid Library Building
The University of Western Australia
Speaking up for the aged: Thomas Hoccleve’s advice to a medieval king in The Regiment of Princes (London, c 1411).
Anne Scott
It can be worrying enough to plan for retirement even when one is in receipt of a regular salary and employed by an organisation with well-formed systems for ensuring that superannuation is structured. How secure do we feel at the prospect of an old age when we will no longer have the chance to earn our keep and must become dependent on a pension, whatever form this may take? Thomas Hoccleve, bureaucrat and court poet of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, lived and worked in an era when regular salaries were unknown, and even the most powerful knights of the realm might end their days in near penury. Certainly payment was made for services rendered, and there were schemes for taking care of the medieval elderly. But Hoccleve, employed for more than twenty years as a clerk in the Privy Seal, and writer of court poetry, was well placed to witness the volatile rise and fall of the powerful, and to speak up for the dues of those who, having given service to crown and country, have become needy in their old age. In poetry of remarkable sensitivity Hoccleve writes of his anxieties and insecurities when he contemplates old age and, above all, stresses the need for justice in the provision of care for those who have devoted their life’s work to the service of their nation.
Dr Anne Scott is Convenor of the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research, as well a being an honorary research fellow in the Discipline of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. As Network Convenor she brings together researchers across Australia, providing the infrastructure to assist them with inter-institutional and interdisciplinary research collaboration. Her own field of research is in fourteenth-century English Literature, and her monograph entitled ‘Piers Plowman and the poor’, Dublin: Four Courts Press, was published in 2004. She has published several essays on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature, and work is currently in progress for a book on the iconography and representations of poverty in medieval English literature and art. Among other literary diversions, she is co-editor of Parergon, the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, now available as part of the Project Muse database.
Please note that the ground floor entrance to the Library, nearest to the carpark, will be open from 7.30pm - 7.45pm.
Members: Free Non-members: $5.00 donation
