Thomas Hoccleve’s Collected Shorter Poems: A Critical Edition of the Huntington Holographs, ed. Sebastian J. Langdell. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023, xxix, 204 pp.

Scholars of Middle English literature have long known Thomas Hoccleve (ca. 1367–1426), but this has not meant that he has attracted solid attention, although he was, as has been commonly stated, one of Chaucer’s followers and a significant poet on his own. But despite this recognition that he was one of the best fifteenth-century English poets, efforts to edit his works that began in 1796 have been insufficient, at least in light of modern editing methods, with the exception, in part, of the edition by Frederick J. Furnival (1892) and Israel Gollancz (1925, rev. ed. by J. Mitchell and A. I. Doyle in 1970). At best, in recent times, only a selection of his poetry was published, and then in a way that no longer meets current scholarly standards, according to which we pay particular respect to the manuscript tradition.