In his ‘Address to Sir John Oldcastle’, the poet Thomas Hoccleve offered the following advice to the heretical, rebel knight:

Reading occupies a central place in the programme of correction and reform that Hoccleve recommends for Oldcastle. Rather than continuing to ‘Clymbe … in holy writ so hie’, Oldcastle should read stories about Lancelot, the sieges of Troy or Thebes, or a version of the late Roman military handbook, De re militari (‘Vegece of the aart of Chiualrie’). Reading is figured here as corrective, as an activity which might enable Oldcastle's ‘correccioun’. The texts that Hoccleve recommends are the textual embodiments or representatives of those things that belong ‘to thordre of knyght’, to which things Oldcastle is urged to ‘applie’ himself. Reading is here imagined as an active process, in ways which recall Grafton and Jardine's formulation of texts being ‘studied for action’, and is intimately connected to self-transformation. The reading of these texts and presumably the reading of Hoccleve's own poem will enable Oldcastle to fashion himself as the ‘manly knyght’ (line 9) he once was and will lead to his ‘correccioun’, just as his reading of ‘holy writ’ led to his error.