“[S]treite vnto my mirrour and my glas”
Disabled Ethos in Thomas Hoccleve’s “My Compleinte”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22248779 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christina V Cedillo (University of Houston - Clear Lake, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 9-28 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for the History of Rhetoric (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2687-8003 • E-ISSN: 2687-8011 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/jhistrhetoric.27.1.0009 |
| OpenAlex | W4399481850 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
Invoking James J. Murphy’s reminder that we can still learn from people of the past, this article examines Thomas Hoccleve’s 1420 poem “My Compleinte” as an example of medieval “disability rhetorics,” or how disabled people themselves speak about disability and being disabled. In this poem, Hoccleve adapts the genre of the speculum principis (mirror for princes), which guides readers toward moral action, to depict his past mental breakdown and subsequent social alienation in order to exhort his former friends to amend their attitudes toward him. While disability as a concept and an identity proves anachronistic in relation to the Middle Ages, Hoccleve’s poem presents a vital case study in ethos construction driven by disability, reflecting some of the same rhetorical concerns facing disabled rhetors today despite the passage of time
Aesthetics · Alienation · Anachronism · Art · Ethos · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Theology · Early Modern Women Writers · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Rhetoric and Chastity
The social model of disability
'By cowntynaunce it is not wist'
Toward a transhuman model of medieval disability
Disability and the social body
Recent Perspectives on Leprosy in Medieval Western Europe 1
The History of Madness and Mental Illness in the Middle Ages
Lo, Heer the Fourme”
Hoccleve's Complaint and Isidore of Seville
Medieval Leper Hospitals in England
Literary genre, medieval studies, and the prosthesis of disability
The mirror crack'd
The linear medical model of disability
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |