Dr%20Nicholas%20Perkins: List of publications

Gifts may be touching or puzzling, either strengthening bonds of friendship or becoming a burden. This volume explores how books and writing have described gift-giving over the centuries, but also how books became precious gifts themselves. Drawing on the Bodleian Library's extraordinary collections alongside other books, art and objects, this book traces the dynamics of giving and receiving across many centuries, from ancient civilizations to the contemporary world.

Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of ...

The Remonstrance to Sir John Oldcastle by Thomas Hoccleve (c.1367–1426) was written in 1415 and survives in one of Hoccleve’s holograph manuscripts. It was later twice copied by Richard James (bap. 1591–1638), accompanied by copious notes rereading the poem in the light of Oldcastle’s then status as a proto-protestant martyr. This essay proposes that noticing James’s little-studied manuscript editions and the reading and editing practices in which they are engaged can, first, enrich the reception history of Hoccleve and other late-medieval writers; and, second, prompt a re-examination of Hoccleve’s own responses to the idea of martyrdom. Hoccleve’s layered use of allegory and analogy between exemplary figures and readers – including his own poetic persona – draws the public anti-Lollard rhetoric of the Remonstrance into contact with personal and penitential reflections in The Regiment of Princes and the Series, and I argue that the figure of the martyr is a significant touchstone to assess the resulting blend of discourses and perspectives. Finally, I suggest that the conceptual gap between Hoccleve’s and James’s copies of the Remonstrance can be narrowed by recognising that they are both recontextualizations of the poem, and their different contexts and forms effect their meanings.