User:Eprice96/sandbox

The wikipedia article I've chosen to work on for this assignment is on a historical figure I research, Thomas Hoccleve. The original article without changes is here:Thomas Hoccleve.

Figuring out what to change was challenging, as the article has been cross-checked by scholars, and much of it already sounds appropriate and has reasonably good grammar. I started by clarifying the introduction to Hoccleve at the beginning of the article:"Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (c. 1368–1426) was an English poet and clerk who was a key figure in early 15th-century Middle English literature. While his work was valued primarily for its use as a social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has been recognized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries for its literary and cultural merit."The section where I changed the most was the "Work" section. This is because a lot of scholarship on Hoccleve, and consequently also this Wikipedia page, paints him in an unflattering and often negatively feminized light (as many scholars like Ethan Knapp and Holly Crocker have noted). I also learned that this article takes language from a public domain work from 1911, the entry on Hoccleve in the Encyclopædia Britannica by Hugh Chisholm. My edits were intended to correct some of that language, as well as refocus the article on Hoccleve rather than on Chaucer and prevent opinion-based language. Like his contemporary John Lydgate, Hoccleve's work was undervalued for much of the 20th century, because its poetic form and emotionality led to its dismissal as overly feminine or mediocre in its language (See Furnivall's introduction to Hoccleve's Works, 1892). However, it is now recognized as providing a wealth of insight into the literate culture of England under the Lancastrian regime, as well as an important literary text in its own right. Hoccleve's work builds on the vernacular poetics originally made by his "maister" Geoffrey Chaucer, to whom Hoccleve pays an affectionate tribute in no fewer than three passages in his De Regimine Principum.

Many of Hoccleve's poems are characteristic of his time: his hymns to the Virgin, ballades to patrons, versified homilies and moral tales are genres found in the work of many other medieval writers. It is his autobiographical writing, in the Series and elsewhere, that His narratives about his own life and complaints to the king and the kings treasurer paint a realistic and serious picture of 15th-century London, as they ruminate on a civil servant's place in an unstable Lancastrian bureaucracy. They also offer a glimpse into medieval ideas about health, stress, and overwork. All in all, my changes to this article were thematic rather than structural. I have hesitated to update the article because I want to make sure my own contributions are not motivated by emotion, as those of earlier contributors might have been. I think I will continue to edit other sections and see if I can learn a little more about Hoccleve's works that I'm less familiar with, and feel like the changes I'm making are more informed before I actually change them.