Chaucer's Book of the Duchess: Contexts and Interpretations (45) (Chaucer Studies) [Illustrated] 1843845040, 9781843845041

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Chaucer Studies

Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess

This volume, the first full-length collection devoted to the Book, argues powerfully against the prevalent view that it is an underdeveloped or uneven early work, and instead positions it as a nuanced literary and intellectual effort in its own right, one that deserves fuller integration with twenty-first-century Chaucer studies. The essays within it pursue lingering questions as well as new frontiers in research, including the poem’s literary relationships in the sphere of French and English writing, material processes of transmission and compilation, and patterns of reception. Each chapter advances an original reading of the Book of the Duchess that uncovers new aspects of its internal dynamics or of its literary or intellectual contexts. As a whole, the volume reveals the poem’s mobility and elasticity within an increasingly international sphere of cultural discourse that thrives on dynamic exchange and encourages sophisticated reflection on authorial practice.

Contexts and Interpretations

The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s first major poem, is foundational for our understanding of Chaucer’s literary achievements in relation to latemedieval English textual production; yet in comparison with other works, its treatment has been somewhat peripheral in previous criticism.

Chaucer’s

Book of the Duchess Contexts and Interpretations

JAMIE C. FUMO is Professor of English at Florida State University.

COVER IMAGE: Morpheus bringing sleep to a man in bed; Christine de Pizan, L’Épîtr e Othéa. © The British Library Board. London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fol. 130v.

Edited by Jamie C. Fumo

CONTRIBUTORS: B.S.W. Barootes, Julia Boffey, Ardis Butterfield, Rebecca Davis, A.S.G. Edwards, Jeff Espie, Philip Knox, Helen Phillips, Elizaveta Strakhov, Sara Sturm-Maddox, Marion Wells.

Edited by Jamie C. Fumo

CHAUCER STUDIES XLV

CHAUCER’S BOOK OF THE DUCHESS

CHAUCER STUDIES ISSN 0261-9822

Founding Editor Professor Derek S. Brewer Editorial Board Professor Helen Cooper Dr Isabel Davis Dr Robert Meyer-Lee Dr William T. Rossiter

Since its foundation, the series Chaucer Studies has played a highly significant role in the development and promotion of research on Chaucer and his many cultural contexts. It is an ideal forum for the publication of work by both younger and established scholars, comprising innovative monographs and essay collections together with indispensable reference books. Chaucer scholarship just would not be the same without it. Professor Alastair Minnis Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University

The publisher welcomes new proposals for the series; monographs are particularly encouraged but volumes of essays will be included when appropriate. All submissions will receive rapid, informed attention. They should go in the first instance to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director, at the following address: Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book

CHAUCER’S BOOK OF THE DUCHESS Contexts and Interpretations

Edited by JAMIE C. FUMO

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2018 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2018 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978 1 84384 504 1

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgmentsviii List of Contributors ix Abbreviations and Editions xi Introduction: Reopening the Book of the Duchess1 Jamie C. Fumo

I. Books and Bodies 1 Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess11 Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards 2 Idleness, Chess, and Tables: Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess29 B. S. W. Barootes 3 ‘Noon other werke’: The Work of Sleep in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess51 Rebecca Davis 4 Discovering Woe: The Translation of Affect in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Spenser’s Daphnaïda71 Marion Wells

II. The Intertextual Duchess 5 Alcyone’s Grave: Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid 97 Jeff Espie 6 Tribute to a Duchess: The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune119 Sara Sturm-Maddox

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7 ‘Hyt am I’: Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess, the Roman de la rose, and the Fonteinne Amoureuse135 Philip Knox 8 ‘Counterfeit’ Imitatio: Understanding the Poet-Patron Relationship in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess157 Elizaveta Strakhov 9 The Shock of the Old? The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations 177 Helen Phillips 10 Response: The Book of the Duchess, Guillaume de Machaut, and the Image of the Archive 199 Ardis Butterfield Bibliography213 Index230

Illustrations Chapter 1 Figure 1. Opening of the Book of the Duchess, with John Stow’s added sixteenth-century heading, and lines 31–38 of the inserted passage, copied in a different sixteenth-century hand from Thynne’s 1532 printed edition. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, fol. 130. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Figure 2. Scribal colophon: ‘Explicit The Boke Of the Duchesse’. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 638, fol. 141. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Figure 3. A gap for a missing line, left blank by the scribe after line 287. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 638, fol. 115v. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Figure 4. Scribal nota signs marking off parts of the song (lines 475, 481, 487). Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 346, fol 107v. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

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15

22

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The editor, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions

Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support and generosity of those who helped make this collection of essays a reality. At Boydell & Brewer, Caroline Palmer encouraged the project from the beginning and was an invaluable resource throughout its execution. I am grateful also for the very astute observations and suggestions by the anonymous reader for the press. Larissa (Kat) Tracy provided timely advice at an early stage, and the Florida State University Libraries, especially the staff at Interlibrary Loans, heroically discharged every manner of request. Outgoing and incoming English Department chairs Eric Walker and Gary Taylor generously provided teaching release that allowed me to devote my full attention to this project in fall 2017. A grant from the Council on Research and Creativity of the Florida State University Office of Research helped defray costs associated with the completion of the manuscript. Finally, my sincerest thanks are due to this volume’s contributors, whose splendid work, attention to numerous requests and queries, and forbearance throughout the editing process made this volume a genuine delight to assemble.

Contributors B. S. W. Barootes is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies, where he studies devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus in late-medieval England. His monograph project explores the intersections of the elegiac mode and the dream-vision genre in Middle English poetry. He has published on monkish burps, apostrophe and medieval poetics, Middle English etymology, number symbolism in Pearl, and Chaucerian final -e. Julia Boffey is Professor of Medieval Studies in the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London. Her interests include Middle English verse, especially lyrics and dream poetry; and the relationships between manuscript and print in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Ardis Butterfield, John M. Schiff Professor of English, Professor of French and Music, joined the English faculty at Yale University in July 2012. Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France (2002) and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (2009). Among her current projects are an edition of medieval English lyrics for Norton, and a book on lyric: Living Form: The Hidden Music of Medieval Song. Rebecca Davis, Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine, is the author of Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature (2016). Her current research interests include representations of thought and interiority in medieval texts; questions of form, especially the mechanics of motion and plastic or porous forms; and the phenomenology of fiction. She has published on Piers Plowman, medieval romance, and Chaucer’s dream visions, and from 2012 to 2016 co-edited the Yearbook of Langland Studies. A. S. G. Edwards is Honorary Professor of Medieval Manuscripts at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the English Association, and the Guggenheim Foundation and serves on the editorial boards of several bodies or journals, including Middle English Texts, the Scottish Text Society, Florilegium, and The Book Collector. He writes occasionally about Middle English manuscripts and texts. Jeff Espie is a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. His recent articles are published in Spenser Studies, Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, and

x  Contributors

the Chaucer Review, and he is writing a book entitled Forms of Mediation: Spenser, Chaucer, and the Origins of English Literary History. Jamie C. Fumo is Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (2015) and The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics (2010), as well as numerous articles on Chaucer, late-medieval intertextuality, and classical transmission. Philip Knox is a University Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity College. He is working on a study of the Roman de la rose in fourteenth-century England. Sara Sturm-Maddox is Professor Emerita of French and Italian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published widely on medieval and Renaissance literature in French and Italian, including books on Dante, Petrarch, and Ronsard and numerous articles on the courtly tradition, medieval romance, epic, and lyric poetry. Recent work includes the co-translation with Donald Maddox of the fourteenth-century Roman de Melusine of Jean d’Arras, and studies of the dits and the Prise d’Alixandre of Guillaume de Machaut. Helen Phillips was until retirement Professor of English Literature in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. Her research and publications are in the areas of medieval English and French literature, especially Chaucer, the Robin Hood tradition, medievalism and modern poetry. She is currently engaged in a study of the Welsh poet Tony Curtis. Elizaveta Strakhov is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University. Her research focuses on late medieval Anglo-French literary relations, political and occasional poetry, and the history of the material text. She is currently working on a book project entitled Politics in Translation: Lyric Form and the Francophone Author in Late Medieval England and co-editing John Lydgate’s Dance of Death and Related Works for TEAMS. She has previously published on Chaucer, Machaut, Deschamps, and Langland. Marion Wells has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University, and is currently the Henry Hudson Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College. Her first book, The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance, was published in 2007, and she is currently completing a second book on the intersection of gender and emotion in medieval and early modern literature.

Abbreviations and Editions Louise W. Stone, and William Rothwell, eds., Anglo-Norman Dictionary, Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association 8 (London, 1977). AW Adolf Tobler, and Erhard Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch: Nachgelassene Materialien (Neudruck, 1954). ChR Chaucer Review CT Canterbury Tales DALF Godefroy, Frédéric, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française (Paris, 1881). DMF Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330–1500) EETS Early English Text Society  ES  Extra Series  OS  Original Series MED Middle English Dictionary OED Oxford English Dictionary PL Patrologia Latina RES Review of English Studies SAC Studies in the Age of Chaucer STC Short Title Catalogue AND

Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Chaucer refer to The Riverside Chaucer, by line number. Quotations of CT are by fragment and line number. All quotations of the Bible from the Vulgate version (Douay-Rheims trans.).

Introduction: Reopening the Book of the Duchess JAMIE C. FUMO

Initiates into the history of scholarship on the Book of the Duchess (BD) may recognize in this introduction’s title a nod to Bertrand H. Bronson’s 1952 PMLA article ‘The Book of the Duchess Re-Opened’. Bronson’s bibliophilic conceit heralded an enlarged perspective on Chaucer’s earliest narrative poem, one that eschewed the biographical and philological approaches that dominated early twentieth-century criticism in favor of psychological readings that would transform scholarship on the poem. The present volume argues that the time is ripe for the Book of the Duchess to be reopened afresh, this time toward an end that is less singular than multitudinous, progressive, gerundial: a reopening. The core verb here is conceived in the spirit of Umberto Eco’s definition of the ‘open work’: one that ‘gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood’.1 Although Eco largely brackets medieval texts as products of a monolithic world view in his discussion of the pleasurably frenetic ‘movement’ of more recent literary works,2 the essays in this volume resoundingly illustrate the labile and variously textured potential of BD, in its own time and in ours. Despite the fact that BD has over the years seen a robust harvest of criticism in the form of articles and book chapters, as well as an excellent critical edition (Helen Phillips’ 1982 Durham and St Andrews Medieval Texts edition, rev. 1997), the only book-length treatment of the poem before very recently was James Wimsatt’s important, but selectively focused, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, published in 1968.3 My own attempt to remedy this gap resulted in the 2015 Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (New Century Chaucer series, University of Wales Press), which 1 2 3

Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 3. On ‘works in movement’, see ibid., p. 12; on medieval texts, pp. 13, 40–1. James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Background of the Book of the Duchess (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968).

2  Jamie C. Fumo

establishes the groundwork of the poem’s material transmission, history of interpretation, and creative reception while emphasizing its susceptibility, prefigured by its own contemplation of textual processes, to (re)making. Several of the questions raised in my book regarding the field of writing in which BD participates, the work’s problematic journey from manuscript into print, and the cross-cultural matrix it inhabits as a French poem paradoxically and transformatively written in English, are points of departure for the original critical contributions brought together in the present volume. The ‘singularity’ of BD, as Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards describe it in the first chapter of this collection, is of striking antiquity, reaching back to the absence of any free-standing early printed editions of the poem – this in contrast with several of Chaucer’s minor works and all of his other completed dream-visions – and resurfacing in its somewhat peripheral treatment in modern scholarship. Bedeviled by an early twentieth-century critical legacy that saw it as immature, uncouth, or derelict, BD, despite its recuperation by Bronson and others and its responsiveness to exegetical, poststructuralist, and more recently feminist and queer readings,4 has been sidelined in the main currents of Chaucer studies. BD’s heavy dependence on French source materials combined with its own insistence on tidy resolution (‘now hit ys doon’, the poem curtly ends [1334]) have created an impression of transparency, epitomized by Charles Muscatine’s subdued apprehension of it as ‘the most homogeneous in style [of Chaucer’s early poems] and the clearest in meaning’.5 These factors, bias over which remains sotto voce, have de-escalated BD’s critical relevance in ways that this volume attempts to right, for example in Helen Phillips’ excavation of an ‘avant-garde aesthetic’ in the poem’s rhetoric and Ardis Butterfield’s fundamental rethinking of the value of sourcework for an understanding of BD. It is distinctly perilous to take this early poem for granted rather than to contend with the paradoxes in which it revels, not least of which is its status as both ‘multilingual’ – in the sense of playing across multiple linguistically coded registers – and, for that, seminally ‘English’.6 Indeed, BD’s assertion of Englishness even while imbricated in multicultural influences and networks reveals an unexpected relevance to conceptions of English polity in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the age of ‘Brexit’, with its tensions between ethnic nationalism and global multiculturalism. A multiplicity of critical voices is essential to uncovering BD’s own multiplicity, an effort that entails both an analytical foray into its historical ‘singularity’ and a motion toward reintegration. Unlike most of Chaucer’s other 4 5 6

See the interpretive survey of critical terrain in Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (Cardiff, 2015), pp. 7–78. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, CA, 1966), p. 98. See especially Rossell Hope Robbins, ‘Geoffroi Chaucier, poète français, Father of English Poetry’, ChR 13/2 (1978), 93–115.



Introduction  3

dream-visions, BD has never been the object of scholarly conversation in the form of an essay collection,7 quite the contrary: professional discourse on the poem has been especially fragmented, even polarized. An edited volume that brings into dialogue for the first time major voices in criticism on BD today as well as the perspectives of emerging scholars thus performs a valuable service. Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Contexts and Interpretations features essays that pursue lingering questions as well as new frontiers in BD research, such as the poem’s literary relationships in the sphere of French and English writing, material processes of transmission and compilation, and patterns of reception. Each chapter advances a fresh reading of BD that uncovers new aspects of its internal dynamics or of its literary or intellectual contexts. Each, in its own way, addresses the question: How do we account for BD culturally, linguistically, theoretically? Turning away from the either/ or rhetoric of earlier generations of criticism – which stalled over whether to regard the poem as allegorical or courtly, structurally coherent or discordant, authorially polished or textually contaminated, topical or ahistorical, derivative or innovative – this volume foregrounds work that registers BD’s mobility and elasticity within an increasingly international sphere of cultural discourse that thrives on dynamic exchange and encourages sophisticated reflection on authorial practice. The volume, in other words, assembles evidence against the still pervasive view of BD as an underdeveloped or semi-naïve early work that at best presages Chaucer’s mature artistic efforts, and instead takes the poem seriously as a meaningful intellectual effort and a nuanced literary expression in its own right, one that deserves fuller integration with twenty-first-century Chaucer studies. The poem has much to contribute, for example, to our emerging understanding of late medieval vernacularity across French and English (a topic richly plumbed by Butterfield’s The Familiar Enemy [2009], among other recent works); its impact upon the early formation of Chaucer’s canon and ideas of the ‘Chaucerian’ that take shape there is only beginning to be understood.8 A balanced understanding of Chaucer’s literary achievements cannot be attained without serious apprehension of BD as part of Chaucer’s oeuvre and of late medieval English textual production. Multiple paths of dialogue may be traced among the approaches gathered in this collection, two of which are manifested in the broad structural division (I. ‘Books and Bodies’, II. ‘The Intertextual Duchess’) around which the chapters are gathered, on which more below. Since the spirit of the volume is one of skepticism toward traditional divisions in scholarship on the poem, a more fluid, cumulative, and individually customizable mode of organiza7

8

Compare, for example, Carolyn P. Collette, ed., The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge, 2006); Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, eds, Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Cambridge, 2015) (which treats the House of Fame substantially). See my Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, pp. 105–74, for a prolegomenon.

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tion also presents itself, as readers are encouraged to open and reopen the resulting discourse in ways that suit their interests. Rigid organizational principles are not here enforced: essays addressing BD’s literary reception, for example, are not gathered in their own section but interspersed according to thematic consanguinities with other essays. Bodies are meshed with books. Intertextuality is not sequestered from politics. The oscillation of sub-motifs – networks and exchange, work and play, somatic experience and cognition, bodily disorder and healing, authorship and collaboration, power relations and social identity – invites readings of essays in different configurations. Then there is Morpheus. As the master of shape-shifting, illusion, and (in Chaucer’s treatment) zombification, Morpheus features in a great many of this volume’s essays, credited further in the cover image, in connection with matters of literary transmission and imitatio. Invoked at the start of the dream-vision proper, Morpheus is a figure of liminality: between sleep and waking, reality and fiction, Latin and vernacular. Morpheus’s association, as oneiric god, with the imitation of forms, and more explicitly in Chaucer’s poem with acts of impersonation and revivification, associates him with literary transformation. The god proved especially amenable to the ludic intertextuality of the courtly Anglo-French love-vision tradition, which, like modern participatory, or interactive, fiction, empowered artistic collaboration and role-playing to remap common imaginative territory. When BD’s insomniac narrator singles out the existence of a god of sleep as the import of the Ceyx and Alcyone story that he reads in bed, we may be tempted to regard this as Chaucer’s send-up of interpretive naïveté. The joke, however, is on us: for in the very motion of invoking Morpheus in his quest for repose, the Chaucerian narrator in fact asserts his currency in a fashionable and momentous poetic conversation. To overlook this is to read naïvely. Indeed, the derangement of the Ovidian source-narrative here primes us to discern the elasticity of literary tradition in a poem that will proceed to retell something rather like the Ceyx and Alcyone story with a different cast of characters and inverted gender roles. It is no coincidence that the Ovidian story read by the narrator in bed becomes porous precisely at its juncture with the Cave of Sleep; it is this, not his sympathy for Alcyone, that prompts him to ‘enter into’ Ovid’s text, to fictively interact with it by praying to ‘this ylke god, Morpheus’ for sleep (BD 265). As Colin Burrow observes, the Cave of Sleep is perhaps the most richly imitated of all the episodes in the Metamorphoses precisely because of its own fascination with imitation. This ‘imitative self-consciousness’ luxuriates on the level of language, as words such as imitamine, imagine, simulacra, and fingant evoke the materials not just of dreams but of fiction – literary creation as imitatio.9 Poets from Statius

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Burrow, ‘“Full of the Maker’s Guile”: Ovid on Imitating and on the Imitation of Ovid’, in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception, ed. Philip



Introduction  5

to Spenser revisited Ovid’s episode in fictionally dense ways, reflecting on the deceptive nature of imitation, and even today Morpheus’s name retains an association with the productive transgression of domains – the action of art – as evidenced by the character Morpheus in the Matrix movies, who moves between real and virtual worlds. When, in BD, Chaucer’s narrator takes his small step into the pages of the Ovidian book, seeking the threshold of Morpheus’s cave, he also makes a giant leap into vernacular literary history. Well before Spenser’s use of it to limn the powers of imagination and deception near the beginning of the Faerie Queene (I.i.36–46), the Cave of Sleep presented fourteenth-­ century vernacular courtly poets with a medium in which to dream their way into a tradition (as most keenly exemplified by Chaucer’s invocation to Morpheus in a work as self-consciously preoccupied with the poetic vocation as the House of Fame; see lines 66–80). By the time Chaucer composed BD, Morpheus constituted a well-established signature within a continuous, if internally contested, poetic tradition. An alternative title for Guillaume de Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse (deployed by the author himself in his later Voir Dit) was Le livre de Morpheus, and Jean Froissart in Le Paradys d’Amours appropriated Morpheus as the hinge between his poem and Machaut’s by foregrounding the god in the opening and closing passages. In BD, Morpheus functions as a portal between French and English writing,10 as we see Chaucer, like the oneiric god, inspiriting, or voicing over, a prior body of discourse (the complexities of which are considered in depth in Philip Knox’s and Elizaveta Strakhov’s contributions below). Much as Chaucer capitalized on a fashionable classicizing strand of French courtly tradition by summoning Morpheus in his text, English poets after Chaucer channeled his voice to ornament, authorize, and even inspirit (witness again Spenser) their own writing. BD’s broad influence on fifteenthand sixteenth-century allegorical visions has not been stressed adequately: its establishment of an English courtly idiom inflected by French amatory verse convention, its construction of a dream frame, its motif of book-reading, and its articulation of vernacular authorship combined to usher in new literary tableaux with a Chaucerian imprimatur. In fact, the emulation of Chaucerian verse, in dream-visions that name or otherwise respond to Chaucer, coincides somewhat frequently with a thematically rich evocation of the Morpheus

10

Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 271–87 (at pp. 277–9, qt. at p. 279). Recently, Morpheus has also been seen to straddle fiction and historical reality, implicitly suggesting BD’s supplication of John of Gaunt: see Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Place of the Bedchamber in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, SAC 37 (2015), 133–61 (esp. pp. 154–6); and Jamie C. Fumo, ‘The “alderbeste yifte”: Objects and the Poetics of Munificence in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Exemplaria 28/4 (2016), 277–96 (at pp. 289–92).

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figure.11 It even seems possible that, by virtue of Chaucer’s inscription of the god of sleep as a figure of literary transformation and textual intervention, Morpheus came to be affiliated with the Chaucerian in early English courtly poetry. For all these reasons, Morpheus haunts this volume. An epitome of intertextuality, the god meddles with voices, bodies, boundaries, and fiction in ways that are germane to many of the concerns of the following chapters. The first overarching section of the volume explores the textual construction and internal dynamics of BD, particularly in its relation to bodies (both textual – e.g., bodies of writing – and corporeal). The intimacy between bodies and books inheres in the material form of medieval manuscripts (animal hide), the hierarchy of spirit and sense, and, in BD, the unbroken lines between the dreamer’s sleeping body and the opened pages of the Ovidian book (see lines 274–5), as well as the resulting English book’s ‘embodiment’ of the lost White. The initial concern of the volume is to establish the essential coordinates of text and transmission. Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards provide an anatomy of the material circumstances of BD in manuscripts and early print, highlighting the historical, textual, and codicological complexities that shape it. They remind us how textually contingent is our understanding of Chaucer’s body of writings, with BD presenting an especially acute complex of problems relating to production, transmission, and compilation. Interpretive problems that have occupied critics over the years are indeed dwarfed by textual perplexities including a late and rather unimpressive manuscript history (despite the poem’s seeming occasionality), a long and crucial passage absent before the age of print, and considerable scribal error and inconsistency. This essay stands as a salutary reminder to literary critics of the importance of keeping in view the precarious material circumstances of BD in the course of critical interpretation. B. S. W. Barootes then turns to conceptions of books not as objects but as repositories of fable, investigating the intertwinement of fiction with ludic activity (and hence bodily pleasure). BD’s references to games (‘tables’) and fables, Barootes demonstrates, intervene in the deeply grounded late medieval devotional and literary disparagement of spiritually corrosive pastimes. Paying attention both to minute lexical patterns and broad intellectual contexts, Barootes establishes BD’s thoughtful engagement with, and inde-

11

The anonymous Assembly of Gods, in which Morpheus plays a central role, is the bestknown example; see Assembly of Gods, ed. Jane Chance (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999). Helen Phillips points to several others, the English translation of Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage (printed in 1509 by Winkyn de Worde), On Lord Burghley’s Crest (a long allegorical work attributed to Francis Thynne, son of Chaucer’s editor William Thynne), and Stephen Hawes’ Example of Virtue being the most suggestive of these. Phillips, ‘The Book of the Duchess, Lines 31–96: Are They a Forgery?’, English Studies 67/2 (1986), 113–21 (at pp. 116 n. 17, 121 n. 38).



Introduction  7

pendence from, English penitential conventions. What emerges is an understanding of BD as resisting the prevailing trivialization of fiction as idle, to exalt it instead as restorative and constructive: ‘better play’ (BD 50). Against idleness Rebecca Davis considers ‘work’ in sleep (and sleep as work) concomitant with the creative production of texts, also finding Chaucer to affirm the seriousness of fiction. Focusing on the medium of sleep, as distinct from dreaming, as a transitional space of interpenetration between mind and body, Davis contends that BD comments metatextually on the creative process, especially the limitations of elegy. Like Davis, Marion Wells is concerned with cognitive transactions and with problems of embodiment in relation to the expression of subjective experience. Whereas, for Davis, these operations center upon the challenges of transforming inner experience into written text, for Wells, they concern the translation of affect into expressive emotion. Drawing from psychoanalytic methodologies, affect theory, and the history of medicine, Wells examines the discourse of emotion in BD, particularly in relation to linguistic expression and notions of translatio. The essay defines BD’s position on these issues comparatively, exploring its creative friction both with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Edmund Spenser’s Daphnaïda, the latter analyzed not simply as an act of ‘reception’ but as an active reading of BD that underscores the interpretive problems the earlier poem negotiates. The comparative methodology delineated in Wells’ chapter resurfaces as the dominant analytical mode in the essays comprising the second half of the volume, ‘The Intertextual Duchess’. First, Jeff Espie, who, like Wells, traces the dialogue between Spenser’s Daphnaïda and Chaucer’s BD, advances a theoretical model, centered upon memorialization, that circumnavigates the full territory from Ovid to the French dits to Chaucer to Spenser, shedding new light on both the intertextual relationships and historical context of BD. Discerning in these layered materials a poetics of proximation and tactile contact, rather than one of genealogical succession, Espie traces the richly shifting imagery of writing and inscription, and the link between tombs and poems, as these circulate around BD. Following is a cluster of essays that focus more specifically on BD’s relationship with its French precedents. Sara Sturm-Maddox pursues the braided historical and literary situations of France and England, training her attention on the intertextual relationship between BD and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, with respect to linguistic borrowing as well as broader thematic patterns. Observing that both texts are tributes to duchesses claimed by the Black Plague, Sturm-Maddox weighs the implications of Chaucer’s incorporation of allusions to the Remede’s account of a lover’s trajectory, in which themes of consolation and remedy figure significantly, within the larger framework of Blanche of Lancaster’s death. Philip Knox, in the following essay, explores how several of BD’s most intractable cruxes take shape around problems of voice and identity. Reading Chaucer’s poem against the fabric of French love narratives, especially the composite Roman de la Rose, Knox

8  Jamie C. Fumo

shows how acts of ventriloquism destabilize representation, and emotional utterance in particular, in the context of death. Knox’s insights into the uncanniness of the creative process as it straddles personal experience and textual mediation extend the concerns of the first part of the volume and set the stage for Elizaveta Strakhov’s reading of Morpheus as a lens on Chaucer’s and Machaut’s differing approaches to imitatio. Locating these differences within ancient and medieval rhetorical theory, Strakhov traces BD’s and the Fonteinne Amoureuse’s distinct stances on the poet’s place within literary tradition, the communicative properties of language, and the socioeconomics of late medieval patronage. The final two chapters of the volume intersect plurally with what has come before, and strike new territory. Helen Phillips revisits what has often been derided as a mark of BD’s artistic conventionalism or immaturity: its exemplary lists of famous antique figures. Scrutinizing the stylistic and rhetorical function of these name lists, and contextualizing them within Chaucer’s broader poetics, Phillips shows them to be a supple and variegated component of the poem’s performativity. Complementing Strakhov’s attention to rhetorical devices and Maddox’s emphasis on social history, Phillips sees in BD’s invocations of tradition the consoling power of collective knowledge as ‘plesaunte to prynces paye’.12 Finally, Ardis Butterfield’s response to the volume launches from a concern that dominates Phillips’ and various other essays – the poetics of citation – and argues for a revisionary approach to source study in BD in terms of the mnemonics of the ‘archive’. Through a reading of BD in relation to several of Machaut’s texts, including the little-considered (by Chaucerians) Prologue, Butterfield builds on Mary Carruthers’ work on the instrumentality of memory in composition,13 illuminating the deep operation of ‘memory cues’ – images, sounds, and texts – in BD and the French materials that inspired it. In reframing BD’s textual construction, literary relationships, and elegiac project as a three-dimensional modality, one that both activates and thematizes memory, Butterfield models what is also the goal of this volume: an immersive experience of a text and its contexts.

12 13

Pearl, ed. Sarah Stanbury (Kalamazoo, MI, 2001), line 1. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990).

I

Books and Bodies

1 Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess JULIA BOFFEY AND A. S. G. EDWARDS

The range of questions posed by the codicological and textual forms in which The Book of the Duchess (hereafter BD) survives is closely connected to the larger enigma of the context in which it originated and was first recorded in manuscript. The three surviving copies all date from around 50 years or more after Chaucer’s death, and they offer no explicit information about the historical circumstances in which the poem took shape and was first transmitted. There are no forms of external evidence concerning its date or occasion of composition, and much weight has had to be placed on cryptic internal allusions in order to reconstruct a plausible occasional significance: the death from plague of John of Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche, duchess of Lancaster on 12 September 1368. The poem makes no explicit allusion to her death, and only the line ‘And goode faire White she het’ (948), and a cluster of final gestures (1318–19) to Lancaster (‘long castel’), ‘St John’, and ‘Richmond’ (‘ryche hil’: John of Gaunt was earl of Richmond in Yorkshire until 1372) suggest its connections with the death of the duchess. This internal allusion to ‘White’ is supported by some very late evidence in one manuscript. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16 includes at the beginning of the poem the added note that it was ‘made by Geffrey Chawcyer at ye request of ye duke of lancastar: pitously complaynynge the deathe of ye sayd dutchesse blanche’ (fol. 130). This note, in the hand of the sixteenth-­ century antiquary John Stow (1525–1605), provides the earliest surviving assertion of the poem’s occasion. Stow has also written the name ‘blanche’ in the margins opposite several occurrences of the word ‘white’ in the poem, at lines 905 (fol. 141v) and 948 (fol. 142); his is probably also the hand that has written ‘she ys dedde’ (fol. 147) in the margin opposite line 1298 (‘Sir quod I where is she now’, anticipating line 1309: ‘She ys ded’). Stow was both a collector of Middle English manuscripts and an antiquarian of distinction who clearly had some interest in the content of the poem and in Chaucer more generally.1 His information is one reminder of how fragmented 1

For a survey of Stow’s importance as a student of Middle English manuscripts see A. S. G.

12  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

Figure 1. Opening of the Book of the Duchess, with John Stow’s added sixteenthcentury heading, and lines 31–38 of the inserted passage, copied in a different sixteenth-century hand from Thynne’s 1532 printed edition. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, fol. 130



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  13

the transmission of information about the poem has been. Our only direct information about its occasion depends on claims dating from (probably) nearly 200 years after Chaucer composed it, yet much later biography and criticism has depended on Stow’s note. It is not clear whether BD was composed as an immediate response to Blanche’s death, or whether, as seems equally, if not more, likely, it was written at a later date, possibly to mark the erection by Gaunt of an alabaster tomb in her memory in 1374.2 The case for the later date for the poem’s composition gains some support from the fact that 1374 was the year in which John of Gaunt began to pay Chaucer a life annuity, a circumstance that could be seen as a reward for the poem’s composition.3 But such a possibility is no more than that. As is often the case, links between Chaucer’s biography and his writings remain speculative. Such unresolvable questions about the circumstances of the poem’s creation have an obvious bearing on any understanding of the chronology and evolution of Chaucer’s poetic career. All that is clear is that BD must have been in existence in a form that Chaucer’s audience could have been aware of by the time he mentions it in the earlier version of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which probably (but not certainly) dates from the mid 1380s. The reference to BD in the Prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale (‘In youthe he made of Ceys and Alcione’; CT II, 57) may seem likely to postdate the reference in the Legend, but confirms the general view that BD is one of Chaucer’s early works. However, it remains possible that ‘Ceys and Alcione’ refers to a work originally distinct in form and/or design from BD, which may have been adapted and incorporated into what became that poem. Speculation about the date of the poem’s composition naturally extends to speculation about the form in which it might initially have circulated. We know little about the circulation of Chaucer’s works during his lifetime, although it is clear from various of his own allusions that contemporary audiences were known to have been aware of some of them, and thus were, by implication, in a position to read them. Quite how they read them is difficult to know. Since Chaucer speaks of the different forms of accessing Troilus and Criseyde (‘red wherso thow be, or elles songe’ [5.1797]), it is possible that some works were read aloud to assembled listeners.4 BD may have been among these, perhaps initially delivered by the author to a listening audience

2

3 4

Edwards, ‘Stow and Middle English Literature’, in John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past, ed. Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie (London, 2004), pp. 109–18. Phillipa Hardman, ‘The Book of the Duchess as a Memorial Monument’, ChR 28/3 (1994), 205–15. For a review of the different dates that have been advanced, see Michael Foster, ‘On Dating the Duchess: The Personal and Social Context of The Book of the Duchess’, RES 59/239 (2008), 185–96. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford, 1966), p. 271. Such possibilities have been explored in relation to other poems of Chaucer’s by William A. Quinn; see his Chaucer’s Rehersynges: The Performability of the Legend of Good Women

14  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

from a working text that functioned as a script rather than in a form that was intended to circulate more widely for purposes of private reading. The circulation of a shortish work like BD in manuscript form would have been at best precarious. Its 1334 lines would probably have fitted, if a little snugly, into two eight-leaf quires or gatherings, constituting a short pamphlet of 16 leaves. If it were bound it would have been likely to have only a vellum wrapper rather than boards, and its chances of long survival would have been limited. Possibly Chaucer circulated a number of his earlier works in this relatively fragile form, but none now survives outside the more protective form of a larger anthology (as we discuss below, BD is now extant only in larger collections of verse in both manuscript and print). The hypothesis that BD was originally transmitted in the form of a small, lightly bound manuscript may account for at least some of the textual problems present in the surviving witnesses: such flimsy volumes would have been particularly vulnerable to the passage of time and could have been read to destruction or damaged in the course of being casually read. The uncertainty that surrounds any attempt to establish the date and occasional circumstances of the composition and first circulation of BD is also connected to other problems. One is the question of its proper title. The modern title ‘The Book of the Duchess’ appears in two of the three surviving manuscripts, Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638, both of which use the same form of words at the end of the poem: ‘Explicit the boke of the duchesse’.5 In his Retractions to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also speaks of it as ‘the book of the Duchesse’ (X, 1086), and his characterization of the work there may have been the basis for the title in the Fairfax and Bodley manuscripts. But in the Retractions to the Canterbury Tales the title is part of series of references to Chaucer’s writings that may be understood less as a list of titles than as a series of parallel designations of various of his poems as ‘books’: ‘the book of Troilus; the book also of Fame; the book of the XXV. Ladies; the book of the Duchesse …’ (X, 1086). In both versions of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which predate the Retractions, BD is included among the lists of Chaucer’s works as ‘the Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse’ (F 418; G 406), a more specific title directly linked to the seeming occasion of the poem. In Bodleian MS Tanner 346, BD was originally untitled, but a sixteenth-century hand has added ‘Chaucer’s dream’ above the opening line, echoing the title used by William Thynne in the first printed edition of the poem, published in 1532: ‘The dreame of Chaucer’. It is not clear whether Thynne invented this title or (as discussed below) took it from a now lost manuscript source.

5

(Washington, DC, 1994) and Olde Clerkes Speche: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde & the Implications of Authorial Recital (Washington, DC, 2013). The fifteenth-century table of contents in MS Fairfax 16, added on fol. 2 in a hand not that of the main scribe, calls the poem ‘The Boke of the Duches’.



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  15

Figure 2. Scribal colophon: ‘Explicit The Boke Of the Duchesse’. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 638, fol. 141

16  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

The appropriate title for BD is a question that warrants some consideration. Some of the other titles now conventionally assigned to Chaucer’s poems are modern inventions, particularly a number of those rather tendentious ones now given to his lyrics.6 And sometimes, editorial choices regarding titles can reflect and shape very different possibilities of approaching a work.7 In the case of BD, unusually, Chaucer himself seems to offer alternative titles. The evidence of chronology suggests that the earliest title which Chaucer gives his poem, ‘The Death of Blanche, the Duchess’, is a stronger contender to be the appropriate one than has been generally supposed.8 All the early printed editions follow Thynne in titling the poem ‘The Dream of Chaucer’. In Speght’s 1598 edition (STC 5077), the following note appears before the anonymous Isle of Ladies: ‘Chaucers dreame, neuer be-|fore this time published in print. That which heretofore hath gone vnder the name of his dreame, is the book | of the Duchesse of | Lancaster or the death of Blanch Duchesse of | Lancaster’ (sign. Rrriiiv). But in this same edition BD (which appears earlier) is titled ‘The dreame of Chaucer’, a designation repeated in the running title. ‘The dream of Chaucer’ continued to appear as the poem’s title in, for example, John Urry’s 1721 edition of The Works, in John Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain (1782), in Robert Anderson, The Works of the British Poets (1795), in and Alexander Chalmers, The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper (1810). ‘The Book of the Duchess’ does not seem to have gained any currency as a title before S. W. Singer, The British Poets (1822). The codicological and textual forms in which BD survives raise further questions about its identity. It appears in three manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Fairfax 16, Tanner 346 and Bodley 638, manuscripts often referred to as the ‘Oxford Group’ because of their current location and significant shared contents, particularly of Chaucer’s works.9 All these manuscripts include, in addition to BD, the Legend of Good Women, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Chaucerian lyric ‘Complaint to Pity’, as well as John Lydgate’s Temple of Glass. Chaucer’s House of Fame, Complaint of Mars, and Complaint of Venus also appear in both Fairfax and Tanner, as does the possibly non-canonical ‘Complaynt d’Amour’. The surviving evidence

6

7 8

9

For example, ‘Lack of Steadfastness’, ‘A Complaint to his Lady’, ‘The Complaint of Venus’, ‘Womanly Noblesse’, ‘The Former Age’, and ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse’ are all titles invented in the nineteenth century. For example, the poem generally titled Troilus and Criseyde is called in some manuscripts ‘Liber Troili’ (‘the Book of Troilus’) or ‘Troilus’. Steve Ellis, ‘The Death of the “Book of the Duchess”’, ChR 29/3 (1995), 249–58, reviews the various titles as they appear in manuscript and in printed editions and argues that Chaucer’s title is ‘The Death of Blanche the Duchess’. The formulation was made by Eleanor Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York, 1908), pp. 338–9.



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  17

suggests that, in common with all of Chaucer’s dream-visions, BD may never have circulated in manuscript as a stand-alone work. The links between these manuscripts are not just those of shared content and current location. Their construction reflects the importance of booklets in fifteenth-century English manuscript production: that is, of distinct series of quires or gatherings, containing single texts or groups of smaller ones, that could be assembled into larger compilations.10 The distinctness of the five constituent booklets of MS Fairfax 16, all copied by one practised scribe, can be reconstructed from the evidence of blank leaves at the ends of booklets and from the fact that each booklet has been foliated by a different hand.11 MS Tanner 346 is the fruit of a collaboration between three different scribes, two of whom shared the copying of BD in two gatherings and a bifolium which together would constitute what is now the third unit or booklet in this compilation.12 While the organization of contents in Bodley 638 appears somehow to derive from booklet compilations like Fairfax 16 and Tanner 346, here the single scribe (‘Lyty’) did not divide his materials into separate units or booklets but instead appears to have copied continuously across gatherings.13 Although BD survives only in these three ‘Oxford group’ manuscripts, the general similarities in content between these and other broadly ‘Chaucerian’ anthologies from the second half of the fifteenth century suggests that anthologies with roughly similar contents may have been produced in some numbers. BD’s print publication history is also of importance. The poem first appeared in printed form in William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s Workes, published in 1532 (STC 5068), fols CClxxii–CClxxviiiv. This was the earliest attempt to collect the totality of Chaucer’s oeuvre and related works into a single edition. Thynne’s edition is a landmark in the historical and textual history of Chaucer’s corpus. Its importance for the text of BD is discussed below. For the moment it is sufficient to note that Thynne’s text does not derive from any of the surviving manuscripts and hence has its own status as an authoritative witness to the poem’s transmission. Before turning in detail to textual questions it is worth reflecting briefly on the singularity of BD’s transmission into printed form when compared with Chaucer’s other dream-visions. Unlike the House of Fame14 and the 10

11 12 13 14

See Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 279–315 (at pp. 280–2); and Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Manuscript Assemblages’, in Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (Oxford, 2015), pp. 263–79 (at p. 268). See John Norton-Smith, ed., Bodleian MS Fairfax 16 (London, 1979), pp. ix–xi. Pamela Robinson, ed., MS Tanner 346 (Norman, OK, 1980), pp. xix–xx. Pamela Robinson, ed., MS Bodley 638 (Norman, OK, 1981), pp. xxiii–xxiv. The House of Fame was printed by William Caxton in 1483 (STC 5087).

18  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

Parliament of Fowls,15 as well as Anelida and Arcite16 and the Complaints of Mars and Venus,17 with which it circulated in manuscript, BD never achieved the status of a separate published work in early printed form. Indeed, the first separate edition of it did not appear until 1982.18 Of Chaucer’s longer poems only The Legend of Good Women also evidently failed to achieve early circulation as a separate printed work. In the case of the Legend both its length (2723 lines) and (particularly) its manifest incompleteness were factors that probably reduced its commercial attractiveness as a separate work to early printers. BD is a shorter poem (1334 lines), but the Parliament of Fowls is considerably shorter still (699 lines) and yet apparently enjoyed some success in printed form. One can only speculate on the apparent lack of interest in giving BD a print identity of its own. One explanation could be that the manuscript copies were somehow unknown or unavailable to printers until the 1530s (some relationship is supposed between de Worde’s 1530 edition of The Parliament of Fowls, STC 5092, and the text in Bodley 638, in which printer’s marks are identifiable);19 another might be that the poem’s association with a specific set of historical circumstances (the death of Blanche of Lancaster) was somehow felt to limit its appeal. The failure of BD to achieve any distinct printed form may also derive in part from the way it was presented in manuscript contexts. For while BD appears in manuscripts in association with other writings of Chaucer, it is never explicitly identified in these in scribal headings or colophons or running titles as by Chaucer. Nor is he named in other canonical works in these manuscripts. Such major works as the House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and the Legend of Good Women are not identified as his work in any of them, and only infrequently in other manuscripts.20 Indeed, neither of the other ‘Oxford Group’ manuscripts, Bodley 638 and Tanner 346, names Chaucer as the author of any of his poems they contain. And in Fairfax only the lyrics ‘Truth’, ‘Fortune’, ‘Scogan’, and ‘Purse’ are identified as Chaucer’s work.21 The processes by which later manuscript compilers or owners and early printers were able to identify some poems as by Chaucer are unclear, but it seems very likely that an association with Chaucer’s name had some bearing on which poems were printed. 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

The Parliament of Fowls was printed several times as a separate work: by Caxton in [1477?] (STC 5091), by John Rastell in [1525?] (STC 5091.5), and by Wynkyn de Worde in 1530 (STC 5092). This was printed by Caxton in [1477?] (STC 5090). Printed by Julian Notary in [1500?] (STC 5089). Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, ed. Helen Phillips (Durham, 1982). See Mary Erler, ‘Printer’s Copy: MS Bodley 638 and The Parliament of Fowls’, ChR 33/3 (1999), 221–9. Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 is the only manuscript in which both The Parliament of Fowls and The Legend of Good Women are ascribed to Chaucer in scribal colophons. As noted above, the title ‘Chaucer’s Dream’ in Tanner 346 is a sixteenth-century addition.



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  19

The textual tradition of BD is complicated by problems that are probably connected to the relative lateness of its surviving witnesses. Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16 (fols 130–147v) and Tanner 346 (fols 102–119v) were probably copied fairly close in time, c. 1450. Hence, the first surviving witnesses to the text of the poem date from roughly 70 years after its latest probable date of composition.22 MS Bodley 638 (fols 110v–141) is a slightly later copy that has been dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth century.23 The lengthy gap in time that separates the manuscript witnesses to BD from the time of its creation is not a situation unique to this poem. Much the same situation obtains with the House of Fame, which also survives in the Fairfax and Bodley manuscripts as well as in Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 2006, a witness from the very end of the fifteenth century. The House of Fame provides another instance where the textual situation is such that posterity must rely on witnesses considerably remote in time from any postulated date of composition. The three surviving copies of BD share some similarities of layout: all are in single columns; all begin with a large pen-flourished initial. All also signal the start of the recollection of the dream (‘Me thoghte thus: that hyt was May’, line 291) in some way: in MSS Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638 with another large initial; in MS Tanner 346 with a marginal nota sign. The distance that separates the surviving manuscripts from any putative date of composition is partly indicated in the textual problems posed by the transmission of the text of BD. In the form in which it usually appears in printed editions the poem comprises 1334 lines, in couplets. But no manuscript has such a complete text. All three manuscripts omit lines 31–96 of the text as it appears in printed editions. That is, at some stage in its manuscript transmission, 66 lines of text were lost. The omitted passage includes the dreamer’s mention of his ‘sicknesse … this eight yeer’ (36–7), his reading of a ‘romaunce’ (48), his falling asleep, and the beginning of his dream of Ceys and Alcyone. The most economical explanation for such a loss is that a complete single leaf became detached from an early exemplar and that all the surviving manuscripts derive from a defective one – assuming, that is, that this exemplar began on the verso of a leaf. The copyists of the surviving manuscripts sought to deal with this large gap in different ways. The scribe of MS Fairfax 16 broke off three-quarters of the way down the page (fol. 130) at line 30 (‘But men myght axe me why soo’), and left blank space on the rest of this page and all of the following one (fol. 130v), before picking up his exemplar at the top of fol. 131, at line 97 (‘Had suche pittee and suche rowthe’). Although the Fairfax scribe seems not to have known exactly the extent of the missing text, he clearly understood 22

23

Norton-Smith, ed., Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, p. vii, dates this manuscript to ‘c. 1450’. The date ‘Anno 1450’ appears at the top of fol. 1 in a later hand. Robinson, ed., Manuscript Tanner 346, p. xix, dates Tanner to slightly before 1450. Robinson, ed., Manuscript Bodley 638, p. xxiii.

20  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

the need to leave a substantial gap, and must have left blank space in the hope that some text would become available to him at a later time.24 The scribe of MS Tanner 346 was less candid, or more ignorant, about the problem of the missing lines. In this manuscript there is no gap after line 30 (on fol. 102); the text continues without a break with line 97. The problem is thus concealed from the reader. It is impossible to say whether this is because the scribe was simply copying what was before him or whether he adopted an ad hoc solution that presented his text as complete and coherent. Since line 30 completes a couplet and line 97 begins one there is no disorder in the rhyme scheme. In Bodley 638 the omission is more extensive: line 23 ‘Slepe & this melancolye’ occurs as the final line on fol. 110v. The next line, as the top of fol. 111, is line 97, here reading ‘had such pite & such routh’. Once again, it is possible that here the scribe was simply following his exemplar, which may already have lacked this part of the text (lines 24 to 96). But a competent scribe should have noticed the failure of the rhyme scheme at this point: ‘so’ in line 30; ‘couþe’ in line 97. The scribe’s oversight in not recognizing the problem here offers further evidence of the ways in which scribal error was a factor in the textual history of BD. The hazards of these processes of scribal transmission mean that the only witness to include lines 31–96 is the very latest, William Thynne’s 1532 printed edition. Thus, for any text of this passage we have to rely on a printed book issued well over 150 years after the poem was probably composed. How do we assess the authenticity of this passage? And, if it is deemed to be authorial, how might Thynne have come across it? There has been little discussion of the likely authenticity of the passage, to the extent that its curious status is not indicated in most editions or given much consideration in literary criticism on the poem.25 The most considered expression of doubt about its authenticity has come from N. F. Blake, who concludes that ‘there is no reliable evidence which proves that this passage was written by Chaucer’.26 Such scepticism is not reflected in any editions. To what extent is it justified? The most obvious evidence in support of the canonicity of the passage is the simple fact of its length. That a later scribe or 24

25

26

The Fairfax scribe copied BD with 36 lines to the page. He left space for six lines of text on fol. 130 and a further 36 on fol. 130v: that is, a total of 42 lines. It seems unlikely that he understood that the gap in his exemplar extended to as many as 66 lines (or a complete leaf of text). A seventeenth-century hand later supplied the missing text, copying from a printed edition (probably from Stow’s 1561 edition). Apart from Helen Phillips’ edition of Book of the Duchess (Durham, 1982), pp. 78, 80, where the insertion of this passage is clearly marked. Phillips discusses the question of the passage’s canonicity on pp. 32–3, 64–5. N. F. Blake, ‘The Book of the Duchess Again’, English Studies 67 (1986), 122–5 (at p. 125); this largely reiterates the conclusions of his earlier article ‘The Textual Tradition of the Book of the Duchess’, English Studies 62 (1981), 237–48.



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  21

editor would have had the poetic resources to create so long a passage without it being readily distinguishable in style and metre from authentic Chaucerian composition seems unlikely. Moreover, there are clear indications elsewhere in his edition that Thynne compared more than one version of the same work to arrive at his printed one.27 The most reasonable explanation for the appearance of lines 31–96 in his edition is that he came across this passage through such comparison. If he had not done this, but recognized the hiatus in sense following line 31, then the alternative options would have been to ignore it, like the Tanner scribe, or to create (or have created) a transitional passage. If he chose the latter option then it would surely have been unnecessary to invent a passage of such length. A transition, if one was felt necessary, could have been created through a much briefer passage. Moreover, the lines in Thynne are clearly and coherently linked both to what precedes and follows in the text. And since the assumption that a single leaf containing the missing lines was lost in the course of the poem’s manuscript transmission is a plausible one, there seem no compelling grounds for questioning their authenticity. The evidence furnished by Thynne’s edition that these lines were available to him somewhere in at least one witness is a reminder of how tenuous the lines of transmission are that enable us to recover some of Chaucer’s texts. Other local textual problems exist with respect to the status of several single lines, where, once again, Thynne provides the sole authority. The first is line 288, which is omitted in Fairfax (fol. 133v) and Bodley 638 (fol. 115v), although a blank space was left for it in both manuscripts. Tanner omits the line (fol. 105), but leaves no space. In Fairfax the blank has been filled by a later hand that is possibly that of the sixteenth-century antiquary John Stow, supplying ‘Suche marvayles fortuned than’ (the reading in Thynne, on fol. CC.lxxiiira, from which it presumably derives). The line is uncompelling in terms of its sense (it is unclear what the ‘suche marvayles’ are), and its status must be open to question. The next portion of text to present similar difficulties comes after line 479. Here, in Fairfax 16 (fol. 136), Tanner 346 (fol. 107v), and Bodley 638 (fol. 119v), the rhyme scheme deviates from the usual form of octosyllabic couplets, leaving line 479 seemingly as a stray line, as follows (the forms here are those of Fairfax 16): I have of sorwe of so grete wone That ioy gete I never none Now that I see my lady bryght Which I have loved with al my myght Is fro me ded and ys agoon … 27

(475–9)

See James E. Blodgett, ‘William Thynne (d. 1546)’, in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul Ruggiers (Norman, OK, 1984), pp. 35–52 (at pp. 42–7). Blodgett also notes that Thynne seems to have had access to at least one manuscript ‘closely related to the Oxford group and especially close to Tanner 346’ (p. 40).

22  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

Figure 3. A gap for a missing line, left blank by the scribe after line 287. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 638, fol. 115v



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  23

Figure 4. Scribal nota signs marking off parts of the song (lines 475, 481, 487). Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 346, fol 107v

24  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

Although none of the manuscripts leaves a gap here for a missing line, Thynne inserted one after 479 to complete the couplet: ‘And thus in sorowe lefte me alone’ (fol. CC.lxxiiirb). After this point, all the manuscripts have something similar to the following (the forms here are again from Fairfax 16): Allas dethe what ayleth the That thou noldest haue taken me Whan thou toke my lady swete That was so faire so fresh so fre So goode that men may wel se Of al goodenesse she had no mete

(481–6)

That is, the rhyme scheme changes after the stray line ‘Is fro me ded and ys agoon’ (line 479) to become aabccb. Thynne’s solution to this was a logical extension of his insertion of the extra line: he reordered the six lines to produce orderly couplets (fol. CC.lxxiiiva): Alas dethe what eyleth the That thou noldest haue taken me Whan thou toke my lady swete Of al goodenesse she had no mete That was so faire so fresh so fre So goode that men may wel se

481 482 483 486 484 485

Most modern editions, including The Riverside Chaucer, take a somewhat piecemeal attitude to this portion of the text, omitting the line inserted by Thynne and yet at the same time marking its presence by setting ‘Is fro me ded and ys agoon’ and ‘Allas, dethe, what ayleth the’ consecutively and numbering them lines 479 and 481. They also print the lines that follow in the order 481–6 rather than in Thynne’s rearranged form (481–3, 486, 484, 485).28 There are two separate problems here: the authenticity of line 480 and the correct sequence of the following lines 481–6. If one assumes that this passage was intended to be in couplets then a line is obviously necessary to complete the couplet begun in line 479, and while the line supplied by Thynne is not a particularly compelling one, it is not easy to dismiss it on stylistic or metrical grounds.29 On the other hand, there is some warrant in the manuscripts for the change of rhyme scheme at this point. Marginal nota signs, seemingly scribal, occur in Fairfax 16 and Tanner 346 next to ‘I have 28 29

For discussion of this passage see Colin Wilcockson’s note in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 970. The most sustained defence of it has come from A. Inskip Dickerson, who has argued for its authenticity; see ‘“The Book of the Duchess,” Line 480’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 66 (1972), 51–4.



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  25

of sorwe of so grete wone’, and in these manuscripts and Bodley 638 next to ‘Alas dethe what eyleth the’ and ‘Whan he had made thus his complaynt’ (line 487, coming at the end of the problematic sequence of lines attributed to the Black Knight).30 It seems that the scribes recognized this portion of the poem as somehow different, and that their marginal signs probably marked out the lines as constituting the ‘lay, a maner song / Withoute noote, withoute song’ introduced in lines 471–2. To understand lines 475–86 (without Thynne’s inserted line) as an inset lyric, with a rhyme scheme aabbaccdccd, has seemed reasonable to some critics, who point out that a ‘complaint’ of this sort would not have necessitated a prescribed rhyme scheme but could reasonably have been distinguished from its surrounding context by a change from the octosyllabic couplets of the rest of the poem. Thynne is the only source for one further line: ‘But whether she knewe or knewe it nought’ (line 886, fol. CC.lxxviva). In Fairfax 16 a blank space left for it (fol. 141v) was later filled in by what seems to be John Stow’s hand, which has copied the words ‘But whither she knew or knew it nought’, probably from a printed edition. The scribe of Bodley 638 omitted the line (fol. 129v) and left a space; the scribe of Tanner 346 also omitted the line (fol. 113), but left no space. A line is clearly necessary here to complete the couplet. But the line supplied in Thynne’s edition is a feeble one, seeming at odds with the sense of line 885: But many oon with hir loke she hert And that sate hyr ful lytel at hert For she knewe nothynge of her thought [But whether she knewe or knewe it noght] Algate she ne rought of hem a stree.

883 885

There must be a fairly high degree of doubt that Chaucer actually wrote this line; at best it fills what it is otherwise a blank. It is not easy to assess the possible authority of Thynne’s additions to the text of BD. There are general grounds for believing him to be a careful editor, one who searched quite widely for manuscripts to establish the texts in his edition. But it has also been suggested that in other poems, particularly the Romaunt of the Rose translation, he did create lines to fill gaps that had been left blank in his copy text.31 Thynne doubtless took a pragmatic view of gaps in his copy texts, as did other early printers. Caxton, for example, added a 12-line conclusion to the incomplete House of Fame in his 1483 first printed 30

31

The song recalled by the Black Knight at lines 1175–80, the ‘firste song’ he made for his lady, is similarly marked in Fairfax 16 with a nota sign (the logic according to which other marginal signs are placed in this copy is hard to fathom). The second song is not indicated marginally in any way in Tanner 346, but in Bodley 638 its presence is announced by a nota sign next to line 1172: ‘Algatys songys thus I made’. See, for example, Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford, 1925), p. 300.

26  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

edition of this poem, a conclusion taken over by Thynne in his own edition of the poem in 1532. But whereas Caxton marked the passage as his own work, Thynne and other printed editions suppressed this information, making it appear as if the passage was authentic. Doubtless a similar pragmatism could have shaped Thynne’s approach to the small number of single missing lines in BD. It is difficult to feel much confidence in at least some of these: lines 288 and 886 in particular pose difficulties. In other respects the different texts of BD offer few instances where variant readings are likely to lead an editor to reconsider the readings of Fairfax 16, the general choice for copy text.32 There are some points where variation is more apparent than real. Line 361 in Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638 reads ‘Of huntes and eke of foresterys’; Tanner 346 varies in reading ‘fosters’ for ‘foresterys’, an aphetic form that is an attested variant of ‘forester’. Thynne reads (fol. CClxxiiivb) ‘Of hunters and eke of foresters’; the variant ‘hunters’ for ‘huntes’ is not a real variant either since ‘huntes’ is an established early form of ‘huntsman’. Again, line 949 in Fairfax 16 and Tanner 346 reads ‘That was my lady name ryghte’, while Bodley 638 and Thynne have ‘That was my ladyes name right’. But the omission of the genitive singular is permitted in Middle English, so both readings are correct.33 There are some other readings that potentially raise questions for the editor. These most often involve points where Thynne’s printed text differs in its readings from those of the manuscripts. For example, in line 178 all of the manuscripts read: ‘This messager come fleynge faste’; in Thynne (fol. CClxxiivb) this line reads: ‘This messanger come rennyng fast.’ The participial form ‘flying’ is rare in Chaucer (it is only recorded once elsewhere, at House of Fame, 543) and is perhaps a harder reading than that in Thynne and hence preferable on this ground. It is possible that the phrase ‘come rennyng’ may have been introduced into Thynne or in his exemplar by some form of eyeskip or attraction of copy from line 161, where this phrase appears (‘Came rennynge fro the clyves adoun’). Such possibilities of scribal error in the manuscript tradition may be evident elsewhere. At line 346 all of the manuscripts read ‘Tassay hys horne and for to knowe’, while Thynne reads ‘Tassay his great horne and for to knowe’ (fol. CClxxiiivb). Thynne’s reading ‘great horne’ creates a hypermetric line and his reading may be discounted for this reason. It seems possible that Thynne or his exemplar came to some confusion about this line in ways that are connected with a line that comes a little later. At line 376 all the manuscripts read ‘With a grete horne blewe thre mote.’ But Thynne reads ‘With 32

33

Compare, however, the views advanced by M. C. Seymour, ‘Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: A Proposal’, Medium Ævum 74 (2005), 60–70, and Murray McGillivray, ‘Editing Chaucer’s Early Poems: A Rationale for Virtual Copy-Text’, Florilegium 27 (2010), 159–76. See Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, Part I: Parts of Speech (Helsinki, 1960), pp. 71–2.



Codicology, Text, and the Book of the Duchess  27

his horne blewe thre mote.’ The less specific reading of Thynne does not have much to recommend it. The obvious verbal links between the phrase in two lines in relatively close proximity suggests again the possibility of some form of eyeskip or other kind of scribal misreading. Some other variations may be explicable as simpler forms of misreading in Thynne. For example, at line 754 all the manuscripts read: ‘Gladly do thane holde here lo.’ Thynne has: ‘Gladly do than holde here to’ (fol. CClxvvb). The difference between ‘lo’ and ‘to’ is quite possibly a simple compositorial misreading of setting copy. Such misreading of copy is possible in other instances where Thynne varies. At line 1039 all the manuscripts read: ‘Myn happe myn hele and al my blysse.’ Thynne has: ‘Myn hope myn heale and al blesse’ (fol. CClxxviirb). Thynne’s line is open to doubt because it is syllabically defective, possibly again through simple compositorial error in omitting ‘my’ after two occurrences of ‘myn’ preceding it in the same line. Thynne’s variant ‘hope’ for ‘happe’ (‘chance’) is just about defensible. But the probability that a compositor, having made one error in a line, would make another in it makes it difficult to defend with much conviction. A considerably greater problem is line 745. Both Fairfax and Tanner read ‘loo she that may be quod y’. Bodley and Thynne (fol. CClxvvb) read ‘Howe that may be (quod I)’. Neither reading is satisfactory in sense or metre. Editors differ in their responses to this variation. Helen Phillips reads ‘“Loo, how that may be” quod Y.’ The Riverside Chaucer reads ‘“Loo, [sey] how that may be?” quod y’ and offers the rueful note: ‘The original cannot be determined’ (p. 1137). This reading may stand for a number of points where the readings in the poem pose difficulties of assessment. It also points to the larger questions of textual uncertainty that surround BD. Any text that survives in forms that are small in number and demonstrably at such an undeterminably distant series of removes from its point of creation will not be susceptible to the possibility of invariably successful restoration. In this respect the text embodies the larger difficulties of response the poem presents in historical and codicological terms as well as in textual ones. Study of BD, critical and historical, needs to proceed with a proper awareness of the problems that inhere in the material evidence of its survival.

2 Idleness, Chess, and Tables: Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess* B. S. W. BAROOTES

In the proem to the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s sleepless narrator does what no dream-vision narrator had done before: he seeks to relieve his insomnia by reading.1 So whan I saw I might not slepe Til now late this other night, Upon my bed I sat upright And bad oon reche me a book, A romaunce, and he it me tok To rede and drive the night away[.]

(BD 44–9)

The narrator suggests that the stories contained in this book will be restorative, that they will bring a sense of balance back to his addled brain: For me thoughte it better play Then playe either at ches or tables. And in this bok were written fables That clerkes had in olde tyme, And other poetes, put in rime *

An early form of this paper was presented at the Making Early Middle English conference at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, 23–25 September 2016. My thanks to the organisers and participants for the opportunity and for their insightful comments and questions. Thanks also to our editor and to the anonymous reader for helpful suggestions and guidance.

1

Marshall W. Stearns, ‘Chaucer Mentions a Book’, MLN 57/1 (1942), 28–31. As Stearns notes, Chaucer is not the only poet to mention a book in a dream vision: Froissart includes a book delivered by a beautiful maiden in his Espinette amoureuse, for instance. Chaucer’s innovation is to propose the book as a remedy for insomnia. See also Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 65–7, which posits a connection between Chaucer’s treatment of insomnia and Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine.

30  B. S. W. Barootes To rede and for to be in minde, While men loved the lawe of kinde. This bok ne spak but of such thinges, Of quenes lives, and of kinges, And many other thinges smale.

(50–9)

The book, the narrator reveals, will not simply ‘drive the night away’ but will put him ‘in minde’ of a time when ‘men loved the lawe of kinde’. The particular appeal of such a golden-age vision of peace and accord can be found in the narrator’s account of his sleeplessness. At the outset of the proem (1–27) the narrator complains of his ongoing torment, a cycle of despair that combines disorientation and exhaustion with a frenetic listlessness: I have gret wonder, be this lyght, How that I lyve, for day ne nyght I may nat slepe wel nygh noght; I have so many an ydel thoght Purely for defaute of slep That, by my trouthe, I take no kep Of nothing, how hyt cometh or gooth, Ne me nys nothyng leef nor looth.

(1–8; emphasis mine)

Chaucer’s use of ydel here plays on the several connotations of the word current in the late fourteenth century. The narrator’s thoughts are ‘empty’ or ‘void’ (OED s.v. ‘idle’ [adj.] A.1; MED s.v. ‘idel’ [adj.] 2a): they are closely associated with nothingness or absence (repeated three times in 11 lines; four times if we include ‘noght’ in line three); the idle thoughts furthermore lead to his ‘felynge in nothyng’ (11). Ydel can also connote an absence of usefulness or worth, a futile effort or one leading to no solid result, foolishness or vanity (OED s.v. ‘idle’ [adj.] A.2a, A.3a; MED s.v. ‘idel’ [adj.] 1a). For all the anxious sorrow the narrator suffers, his thoughts produce no consolation. The unproductivity of the narrator’s troubled state thus corresponds to a third meaning of ydel: to be unoccupied by work or addicted to doing no work, indolent (OED s.v. ‘idle’ [adj.] A.4, A.6; MED s.v. [adj.] ‘idel’ 3a). This sense is dominant in late medieval devotional and penitential texts, where the emphasis is not on a total absence of activity so much as on expenditures of energy and time that yield no boons – social, moral, or material. In this usage we can see anticipated the modern, more typically mechanical sense of the word: moving or operating without making any progress (OED s.v. ‘idle’ [adj.] A.5b). Idleness in the Book of the Duchess carries this meaning, too. Indeed, as the twisting, repetitive proem suggests, the narrator’s ‘many an ydel thoght’ cause a considerable expenditure of energy (we might compare the tossing and turning of the insomniac), but this effort leads nowhere.2 2

Oddly, the MED cites Chaucer’s usage in the Book of the Duchess proem only under sense 1b, ‘~ speche (thought, word), foolish or sinful speech (thought, word)’. While the narrator



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  31

The Duchess proem presents idle thoughts as a problem and the reading of fables as a solution, and, in so doing, contrasts this productive, effective solution with the ‘lesser’ play of chess and tables. In this respect, Chaucer’s poem departs from the typical associations of idleness, fiction, and games in late medieval devotional and secular literatures, where all three are lumped together as symptoms of a sinful existence. Many penitential texts group these activities together. The Ayenbite of Inwyt (c. 1340) provides a catalogue of idle pursuits, including ‘zonges … karoles … tables … ches … [and] oþre fole gemenes’.3 Jacob’s Well (c. 1440) similarly condemns those wastrels who are wont ‘to thynken ydell thowȝtes, to spekyn ydel woordys, to don ydell dedys, þat arn werkys of no profyȝt, as to pleyin at þe tablys, at þe chesse & þe chekyr, at þe hasard, & at swyche oþere vayn pleyis, in vntyme & out of mesure’.4 The early-fourteenth-century Book of Shrift (c. 1300), a penitential manual interpolated into copies of the Cursor Mundi (lines 24971–9547), offers the most succinct example.5 In a passage on the confession of the sin of sloth, the hypothetical penitent laments having been driven to sin by a series of distractions and vices: Quen idel thoght me come and vain Wit will i stode þam noght again, Bot oft i lete þam on me rene, To þai me drogh to dede o sine. I ha me liked ai vm-quile In vnnait wordes, lath and vile,

3 4 5

may well be foolish, he is nowhere shown to be sinful in thought, word, or deed, nor is there anything in the proem to indicate that his anxiety, sorrow, and ‘defaute of slepe’ are born of foolishness, let alone sin. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Richard Morris, EETS OS 23 (London, 1866), p. 207. Jacob’s Well, An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis, EETS OS 115 (London, 1900), p. 105. While the Book of Shrift is now extant, in whole or part, in three Cursor Mundi manuscripts, Ralph Hanna and Katherine Zieman assert that ‘all early copies … seem originally to have included it’. See ‘The Transmission of “The Book of Shrift”’, Journal of the Early Book Society 13 (2010), 255–63 (at p. 255). The Southern redaction of the Cursor Mundi ends at line 23898 and so does not include the Book of Shrift. John J. Thompson argues that the addition of the Book of Shrift marks one of several aggregations of texts around the Cursor’s original narrative-historical core. See The Cursor Mundi: Poem, Texts, and Contexts (Oxford, 1998), pp. 23–8, 174–5. See also Guy Trudel, ‘The Middle English Book of Penance and the Readers of the Cursor Mundi’, Medium Ævum 74 (2005), 10–33, which accepts the links between Cursor Mundi and the Book of Shrift. I do not intend to settle the debate of shared authorship, but, so far as my interests here are concerned, the Cursor Mundi and the Book of Shrift are consistent in their derogatory presentation of fables and romances alongside idle thoughts, vain words, and any number of corollary ludic sins. For the sake of concision, I will refer to the author(s) of both texts as ‘the Cursor-poet’.

32  B. S. W. Barootes Til idel gammes, chess and tablis, Bot or eigning6 hert and rime and fablis. (28332–9)7

‘[I]del thoght’ causes the sinner to indulge in ‘vnnait’ (vain or useless) words, which lead to the games of chess and tables that are so closely aligned with the rhymes and fables that delight a wayward heart. The sinner’s heart and mind, caught up in fabricated joys, are, in turn, filled with further idle thoughts, and he is driven to additional forms of sloth. The similarities between this penitential passage and the first 60 lines of the Book of the Duchess are somewhat striking. In particular, the rhyme of ‘tablis’ with ‘fablis’ common to the Book of Shrift and the Duchess – further charged by the context of ‘idel thoght’ – appears to be relatively rare in Middle English poetry.8 It is not my contention that Chaucer necessarily had these lines from the Book of Shrift in mind as he worked on the Book of 6 7

8

On this reading, see B. S. W. Barootes, ‘Your eigning hert: A Hapax Legomenon in Cursor Mundi, line 28339’, Neophilologus 102 (2018), forthcoming. All quotations from the Book of Shrift are from Richard Morris’s edition of the northern Cursor Mundi, 7 vols, EETS OS 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101 (London, 1874–93), V, 1470– 1586. Wherever possible (lines 1–23898), quotations from the Cursor Mundi are taken from the later Southern Version (c. 1340): The Southern Version of the Cursor Mundi, ed. Sarah M. Horrall et al., 5 vols (Ottawa, 1978–2000), an edition which incorporates extensive notes and corrects most of Morris’s misreadings and errors. Notably, John Gower never uses this rhyming pair in his sprawling Confessio Amantis. In the Squire’s Tale, the only other occurrence of table/fable in Chaucer’s corpus, the rhyme is functional rather than polemical, with ‘table’ used in the sense of dining-hall furniture rather than a medieval variation of backgammon (CT V, 178–82). Chaucer references the game of tables only three times in his poetry: in the Duchess passage under examination; in the Parson’s condemnation of games and ‘hasardrie’ (X, 793), discussed below; and in the Franklin’s Tale, where Dorigen’s friends, to alieve her downcast state, ‘dauncen and … pleyen at ches and tables’ (V, 900). In this last example, the two games appear as typical forms of distraction, albeit in less sinister light than in Middle English devotional literature. With this compare Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle (c. 1338), on the entertainments that accompany Arthur’s coronation feast (‘de diuersis ludendi ibidem’ as per the rubric): Iogelours were þere ynowe, Þat þer queyntise forþ drowe; Many mynestrales þorow out þe toun … Dysours y-nowe toddle þem fables, & somme pleide wyþ des & tables, & somme pleide at hasard fast, & lore & wonne wiþ chaunce of cast; Somme þat wolde nought of þe tabler, Drowe forthe meyne for þe cheker Wyþ draughtes quiente of knight & rok, & oþer sleyghtes ilk oþer byswok; At ilka mattyng þei seide ‘chek;’ Þat most þer loste, sat y þe blek.

(11381–3, 11391–400; emphases added)

This pairing of ‘fables’ and ‘tables’ in Mannyng’s Chronicle lacks the condemnatory tone



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  33

the Duchess, although it is quite plausible that he could have encountered this text, which likely circulated independently.9 Instead, I wish to consider Chaucer’s dream-vision in the context of fourteenth-century vernacular devotional texts like Cursor Mundi and the Book of Shrift to explore the ways in which Chaucer’s first narrative poem pushes back against those arguments that would cast out all game and keep only ernest. Indeed, Chaucer’s juxtaposition of ‘ches or tables’ with the book of ‘fables’ in lines 51–2 hints at a larger recuperative project in the poem, one that seeks to divorce fables from the idleness so frequently ascribed to gaming and the sinful life of which such activity is part. Idleness in late medieval literature has attracted the attention of several critics, but the plights of the Duchess-dreamer and the Man in Black remain understudied. Modern scholarship on medieval notions of idleness depends heavily on Siegfried Wenzel’s seminal 1967 study The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature, which traces the development of spiritual and corporeal sloth from the fourth-century desert fathers and charts the spread of concern about idleness from the cloisters and commentaries to the popular poetry of late medieval Italy, France, and England. More recently, James Simpson and Susan E. Phillips have posited a productive aspect of medieval idleness. Rather than a simple, sinful languor, Simpson regards otium as a necessary, leisurely component of the ‘mental economy’ and one closely connected to the act of reading. His analysis focuses on Reason and Sensuality, an incomplete fifteenth-century translation of the anonymous Les Échecs amoureux (c. 1370–80), a dream-vision which, like the Book of the Duchess, includes a game of chess and positively ‘brims with

9

found in his earlier Handlyng Synne (1303) – discussed below – but it nevertheless registers the link between these pastimes in the late medieval imagination. Quotations of the Chronicle are from The Story of England by Robert of Brunne, A.D. 1338, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London, 1887). British Library, MS Cotton Galba E.ix, Oxford, Bodleian MS Rawlinson poet. 175, and Wellesley, Wellesley College Library MS 8, which are not Cursor Mundi manuscripts, contain excerpts from the Book alongside Latin and English devotional texts, including The Pricke of Conscience. There is some evidence that the Book may have informed parts of the Parson’s Tale, similarities between which were noted by some early readers (one fifteenth-century compiler indeed mistook an excerpt of the Parson’s Tale for the Book of Shrift). See Deborah Youngs, ‘The Parson’s Tale: A Newly Discovered Fragment’, ChR 34/2 (1999), 207–16. Furthermore, Morton Bloomfield suggests that the Book of Shrift was a likely source for Langland’s depiction of the seven sins’ confessions in Piers Plowman, as discussed below. See Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing, MI, 1952), p. 175; cf. Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill, NC, 1967), pp. 135–47. Were Langland aware of this text as he worked and wrote in mid-fourteenth-century London, it is not inconceivable that Chaucer encountered it as well.

34  B. S. W. Barootes

references to literary fable’.10 The poem engages with both classical myth and medieval literature – including the dream-poems of Alain de Lille and Guillaume de Lorris – and through the use of allusion and integument activates the reader’s participation. This activation, Simpson writes, leads to the creation of enjoyable work and thus displaces the typical emptiness, vanity, and stillness associated with so-called idle texts. Phillips takes up a more vocal form of idleness in medieval texts: the problem of gossip. She reads the social transgression of ‘idle talk’, the sins of the tongue that concern the penitential texts I explore below, not as a strictly ‘marginalized speech’ but as a powerful ‘disruptive force’, one that is capable of ‘blurring categories and crossing boundaries’.11 Neither Simpson nor Phillips addresses the Book of the Duchess directly, but, building on their studies, Adin Esther Lears contends that the idleness inherent in the interaction of the Chaucerian Dreamer and the Man in Black, an exchange she characterises as a fusion of confessional and gossipy discourses, is ‘not passive or unproductive’. Instead, Lears argues, the dialogue functions as a ‘corrective force’ that allows the Knight and the Dreamer to make ‘something from nothing’ and thus negates the desolation of the Man in Black’s sorrow.12 Like Phillips and Lears, I am interested in how idleness informs Chaucer’s poetics. I disagree, however, that Chaucer aims to redeem idleness as a valuable state – at least not in the Book of the Duchess. Chaucer’s dream-vision presents idleness as a condition best rejected if one is to move beyond the travails of insomnia and of grief. (Or, for that matter, if one is to produce a poem.) Instead, as I will argue below, bookish Chaucer (through his equally bookish narrator) works to distance fables from idle pastimes in an effort to rehabilitate the tomes of ‘olde tyme’ (53) and the sharing of tales. I will begin by examining how vernacular religious texts position secular tales and tale-telling alongside such sinful activities as gaming, drinking, and swearing – all manifestations of idleness. In the course of this discussion, I will draw on patristic authors as well as secular writers from the late antique and medieval periods, but my focus will be on the vernacular penitential tradition that developed significantly in the early fourteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the Cursor Mundi. I will then return to the Book of the Duchess to consider how the poem presents idleness in both the Dreamer-narrator and the Man in Black. Next, I will argue that the narrator’s early experience with the book foregrounds the role that fables play in the recoveries of

10

11 12

James Simpson, ‘The Economy of Involucrum: Idleness in Reason and Sensuality’, in Through a Classical Eye, ed. Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (Toronto, 2009), pp. 390–412 (at p. 395). Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA, 2007), pp. 5–7. Adin Esther Lears, ‘Something from Nothing: Melancholy, Gossip, and Chaucer’s Poetics of Idling in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 48/2 (2013), 205–21 (at pp. 207–8).



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  35

both narrator and Man. Finally, I will show how Chaucer uses the encounter between the Dreamer and the Man in Black, particularly the early dismissal of the chess allegory, to distinguish fables from the waywardness that characterises idleness and games.

Of Tables and Fables Medieval attitudes toward fiction, both tale-telling and reception, are an increasingly well-studied aspect of the history of literary criticism.13 As with medieval attitudes to games, there existed a spectrum of opinions and responses – from outright acceptance to careful justification or tentative recuperation to total dismissals or bans. However, many influential, orthodox thinkers often took a hard line against profane stories. St Benedict’s Rule prohibits scurrilitas, coarse jests, and idle words; both Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas wrote against games, too.14 In the Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville draws a clear distinction between the serious material meant to instruct and the playful material (ludicris) that only delights; he likewise sets fabula, or ‘mere invention’, against historia, the report of facts.15 A little closer to home for the Cursor-poet and Chaucer, Bishop Alcuin asks ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’16 At the opening of the Confessions, in what became perhaps the most famous (if not the most severe) condemnation of fiction for the Middle Ages, St Augustine renounces the profane tales that engaged him during his youth. Importantly, he establishes a parallel between his juvenile love of 13

14

15

16

For a thorough overview, see Glending Olson’s Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 19–38. See also Vincent Gillespie, ‘From the Twelfth Century to c. 1450’, in The Middle Ages, Vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 145–235 (especially pp. 186–206). Regula Sancti Benedicti VI.8: ‘Scurrilitates vero vel verba otiosa et risum moventia aeterna clausura in omnibus locis damnamus et ad talia eloquia discipulum aperire os non permittimus’ [But as for coarse jests and idle words or words that move to laughter, these we condemn everywhere with a perpetual ban, and for such conversation we do not permit a disciple to open her mouth]. (Translation from Saint Benedict, Saint Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, trans. Leonard J. Doyle [Collegeville, MN, 2001]). The later chapter on the paired tasks of manual labour and reading also warns against the idle monk (frater acediosus) who uselessly indulges in empty chatter and fables (vacat otio aut fabulis) rather than apply himself to his (scriptural) reading, thus corrupting those around him (XLVIII.18). On Aquinas and Gregory, see Olson, Literature as Recreation, p. 25 n. 8. See also Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, pp. 23–8. Etymologiae, I.xl–xli; see Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originvm libri XX, 2 vols, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911); translated by Stephen A. Barney et al. in The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge, 2002). Isidore explains that the word fabula comes from fari (speaking) because these stories are made of mere words, in contrast to the deeds of history that actually took place. Alcuin of York, Alcuini epistolae, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1895), p. 183.

36  B. S. W. Barootes

games (amore ludendi) and the falsis fabellis that lent him such vain delight.17 Augustine’s use of the diminutive (fabellis rather than fabulae) should not be overlooked here, for it speaks to the mature writer’s dismissive opinion of these stories, a view that is echoed, I think, in the Duchess-narrator’s brief catalogue of the stories in his ‘romaunce’: ‘This bok ne spak but of such thinges, / Of quenes lives, and of kinges, / And many other thinges smale’ (BD 57–9, emphasis mine). Moreover, these poetic figments are, in turn, linked to the young Augustine’s vestigia errantes, the wayward steps on the path of his life.18 The image of the twisting and turning course, opposed to the proverbial straight-and-narrow road, is a commonplace in later presentations of slothful deviance, especially those linked to the idle sins of the tavern, gambling, and scurrilous stories. As I will discuss below, Chaucer deploys this commonplace in his efforts to differentiate fables (and his first narrative poem) from such empty and vain pursuits. Secular writers were also concerned with the value and use (if any) of stories and fables. For instance, when Macrobius considers the various types of dreams and their import, he also obliquely parses the types of tales men tell. He, too, discounts fabulae – ‘the very word acknowledges their falsity’, he writes – and relegates them to children’s nurseries.19 The fabulae that Macrobius condemns parallel the insomnium or nightmare, which, in his anatomy of dreams, is characterised as wholly false and without prophetic significance; insomnia are the manifestations of quotidian vexations and anxieties.20 This Macrobian critique informs the work of many medieval vernacular writers, especially those writing in the dream-vision tradition. In a seminal example, 17

18 19

20

Confessions 1.10; see PL 32.668. In this passage, Augustine alludes to Paul’s image of those who harken to false fables and old wives’ tales (2 Timothy 4:3–4; cf. 1 Timothy 4:7), and thus ‘turn away’ from the truth (a veritate … avertent). Paul similarly imagines the waywardness of an interest in fictions in 1 Timothy 1:4–6, where he elevates truth over stories (fide non ficta) and speaks against those who ‘attend to stories and unending, pointless genealogies’ (intenderent fabulis, et genealogiis interminatis), for they deviate from proper instruction and the truth therein to turn instead to empty jangling (aberrantes conversi sunt in vaniloquium). Confessions 1.17; see PL 32.673. He distinguishes these false fables from narratio fabulosa, a type of story that rests on a solid foundation of truth but is treated in a fictitious style, and is, above all, of didactic value. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. W. H. Stahl (New York, 1952), I.ii.6–11. On late antique and medieval concepts of fabulae, see Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘From Late Antiquity to the Twelfth Century’, in The Middle Ages, Vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 99–144 (especially pp. 103–9, 129–38). Cf. Macrobius, Commentary, I.iii.3–8. On the parallels between dreams and fiction in medieval thought and literature, see Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001), pp. 8–22, 282–96; Alison M. Peden, ‘Macrobius and Medieval Dream Literature’, Medium Ævum 54 (1985), 59–73 (especially pp. 65–9); and J. Stephen Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Columbus, OH, 1988), pp. 60–81, 94–102.



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  37

the Roman de la rose opens with Guillaume de Lorris’ inquiry about the lies dreams may tell: ‘Aucunes genz dient qu’en songes / n’a se fables non et mençonges’ [‘Many men sayn that in sweveninges / Ther nys but fables and lesynges’].21 Chaucer also acknowledges this pejorative sense of fable several times in his poetry. Both the Physician (CT VI, 155–7) and the dreamer-narrator of the Legend of Good Women (F 702) contrast their own true, historical tales with the lies of fables, to take but two examples. In his prologue, Chaucer’s Parson likewise exhibits a disdain for fiction when he rebuffs Herry Bailly’s lewd request to share a tale: Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me, For Paul, that writeth unto Thymothee, Repreveth hem that weyven soothfastnesse And tellen fables and swich wrecchednesse.

(CT X, 31–4)

His appeal to apostolic authority combines with his parabolic, rhetorical question – ‘Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest, / Whan I may sowen whete, if that me lest?’ (X, 35–6) – to emphasise the perceived immorality of fables. The Parson contrasts such stories with ‘sothfastnesse’ and equates tale-telling with a departure (weyven) from the way and the life. The English authors and redactors of penitential guides are often antifable, and the Cursor Mundi poet is among the most ardent of these critics. In his oft-cited prologue, he states he is driven to offer this edifying history of the world in rhyme because men of his day foolishly desire only to hear secular, mundane stories: ‘Men ȝernen iestes for to here /And romaunce rede in dyuerse manere’ (1–2).22 These ‘[s]toryes of dyuerse þinges / Of princes prelatis & of kynges’ (21–2) – lines which intriguingly anticipate the Duchess-­narrator’s book that ‘ne spak but of such thinges, / Of quenes lives, 21

22

Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols, Classiques français du Moyen Âge 92, 95, 98 (Paris, 1965–75), vol. 1, lines 1–2. The Middle English translation is from The Riverside Chaucer, p. 686. In La Fonteinne amoureuse, one of Chaucer’s direct sources for the Book of the Duchess, Guillaume de Machaut plays upon the Rose’s Macrobian blurring of dreams and fables when his narrator introduces his own vision: ‘En mon dormant songay .i. songe / Que je ne tien pas pour mensonge, / Einsois le tien a veritable / Et bon, que qui le teigne a fable’ [I dreamed a dream in my sleep / That I don’t consider false, / But think to be true / And good, whoever might call it a fable]. Text and translation from The Fountain of Love (La Fonteinne amoureuse) and Two Other Love Vision Poems, ed. and trans. R. B. Palmer (New York, 1993), lines 1565–8. For a consideration of the Cursor-poet’s use of the term ‘romance’ and a discussion of the prologue alongside contemporary writers’ positioning of vernacular writing in similar catalogues of texts, see John J. Thompson, ‘The Cursor Mundi, the “Inglis tong”, and “Romance”’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 99–120. For a broader examination of ‘romance’ and its connotations in late medieval literature, see Paul Strohm, ‘The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romaunce’, Genre 10 (1977), 1–28, especially pp. 10–11 for Cursor and pp. 14–16 for Chaucer’s Duchess.

38  B. S. W. Barootes

and of kinges’ (BD 57–8) – include tales with protagonists such as Alexander, Caesar, and Brutus; Charlemagne, Roland, and their foes the Saracens; and Gawain, Arthur, and the Round Table Knights. Indulgence in all such stories, the poet insists, is perilous: [Hem þ]at rage in her riot al wey In ryot & in rigolage Spende mony her ȝouþe & her age For now is he holden nouȝt in shouris But he con loue paramouris Þat foles lif þat vanite Him likeþ now noon oþere gle Hit is but fantom for to say Today hit is tomorwe away.

(48–56)

The language with which the poet derides such investment in romance – as ‘ryot’ and ‘rigolage’ (revelry, debauchery) – groups tale-sharing with the traditional pastimes of rioters: gambling, debauchery, and womanising, as well as celebrating such disport in story and song. Given the fleeting nature of earthly works and love, whether for people or romances (or the fin’amor of people in romances), the Cursor-poet encourages would-be poets to turn their minds and quills to a more perduring matter: Þerfore blesse we þat paramoure Þat in oure nede doþ vs socoure Þat saueþ vs in erþe fro synne And heuen blisse helpeþ to wynne.

(69–72)

The eternal, unchanging love of the Blessed Virgin is a much better object for one’s attentions, the poet insists, and, accordingly, a much better subject for stories and songs: Of suchon shulde ȝe matere take Ȝe crafty þat con rymes make Of hir to make boþe geest & songe And preise hir swete son among.

(85–8)

Mary and Christ stand in sharp contrast to the fleeting subjects of romance and mundane song – the things ‘þat no þing may availe’, the mere ‘fantom[s] of þis Wer[l]d’ (90–2). The historical narrative of the Cursor Mundi winds down with a parallel admonition to eschew worldly fables and to heed instead the true message of Scripture. Those who ignore this advice and adhere to ‘[s]toryes of dyuerse þinges’ will have Miche to here & litil to holde But were a ribaudy vs tolde Of a fantum or a fabul Þat wolde we holde in herte stabul



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  39 In herte þat is a sory hord To kepe hit raþer þen cristis word How may he to himself be holde Þat cheseþ leed & leueþ golde.

(23855–62)

The metallic metaphor sets the transience of the ribaldry, the phantom (or fantasy), and the fable against the idealised ‘herte stabul’ and a golden, gospel truth. These passages all emphasise the inanity of such profane pursuits; they are empty ‘fantom[s]’ of the moment that are ‘tomorwe away’. To yearn for the excitement and delight found in romances and other fables, the Cursor-poet asserts, is to chase after the frivolities of this world, to abandon one’s true purpose and calling on earth. He draws a clear distinction between man and the natural world to underscore his point. All beasts, though dumb (21899), follow their God-given duties, as do the lights in heaven and the plants on earth: Alle lyuynge þingis on here maneres Done her deuer & werne nouȝt Þonkynge þe makere þat hem wrouȝt Heuen & erþe sonne and mone And all þat in þis erþe is done Þei serue him alle vpon her wise And man wiþdraweþ his seruyse.

(21900–6)

While the rest of Creation serves gratefully, only ‘man wiþdraweþ his seruyse’ (21906), and he does so, the poet notes, because of an innate covetousness.23 Importantly, the poet figures this cupidity in terms of man’s desire for terrestrial tales: So filled wiþ couetise is he Þat he of god haþ no pite Muche leuer him were to here How Roulande fauȝte & olyuere Of worldly þing to rede & singe Þen of þe passioun of þis kynge.

(21907–12)

The harkening to (and outright preference for) tales of chivalric adventure is thus a dereliction of duty (deuer), a turning away from the clear call to serve the Lord. The spiritual truancy the Cursor-poet associates with secular tales is also 23

This passage parallels Boethius’ vision of cosmological harmony, the ‘allyaunce perdurable’ (line 4), in Book 2, metrum 8 of the Consolation of Philosophy (cited from Boece, in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 420). The image of mankind withdrawing its service likewise recalls the figure in Book 1, metrum 2, who, having turned away from light and clarity, hangs down his head ‘to loken on the fool erthe!’ (The Riverside Chaucer, p. 399, line 32). Compare also the Man in Black’s posture (BD 461), discussed below.

40  B. S. W. Barootes

found in the vernacular penitential books. Robert Mannyng opens Handlyng Synne (1303) by invoking a prompt very similar to that of the Cursor-poet. He targets laymen as the audience for his treatise on sin, sacrament, and shrift: For lewde men y vndyr-toke On englyssh tunge to make þys boke. For many ben of swyche manere, Þat talys and rymys wyl bleþly here; Yn gamys, & festys, & at the ale Loue men to lestene troteuale … For swyche men haue y made þis ryme Þat þey may weyl dyspende here tyme

(43–8, 51–2)24

Mannyng’s prologue explicitly links the indulgence in tale-sharing with games, feasts, and being ‘at the ale’: that is, at the ale-house or tavern. In vernacular devotional texts, the tavern is frequently identified as the demonic counterpart to the righteous space of the church.25 Accordingly, the beerhall is a focal point for sin, most often wrath, lechery, gluttony, and sloth, as well as the attendant ‘sins of the tongue’. A primary site for the circulation of tales and for game-playing and gambling, the tavern also functions as a social leveller, bringing together drinkers, gamblers, and tale-tellers from all walks of medieval life. (We do well to recall that the storytelling game at the heart of the Canterbury Tales begins at the Tabard Inn.) While all available evidence attests that games were wildly popular at each level of medieval society, many games – especially chess, tables, and diceplaying – were criticised, condemned, and even banned by the Church.26 Such

24 25

26

Robert Mannyng, Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS OS 119, 123 (London, 1901, 1903). Andrew Cowell, At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), pp. 141–5. In one short passage of the Ayenbite of Inwyt the tavern is variously dubbed a ‘well of sin’, a ‘ditch of thieves’, ‘the devil’s castle’, ‘the devil’s school’, and ‘his oȝene chapele’ (pp. 56–7). Toward the end of the Ayenbite, the author envisions a redeemed ale-house, ‘þe greate tauerne / huer þe tonne is be-take. þet is ine þe liue eurelestinde’ (p. 247). Robert Bubczyk, ‘“Ludus inhonestus et illicitus?” Chess, Games, and the Church in Medieval Europe’, in Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature, ed. Serina Patterson (New York, 2015), pp. 23–43; cf. H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford, 1913), pp. 408–11. As Bubczyk and other scholars note, chess was frequently celebrated for its intellectual and didactic qualities. Treatises such as Jacobus de Cessolis’ late thirteenth-century Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo scachorum (translated and published by Caxton in 1474 as The Game and Playe of Chesse) and Alfonso X of Castile’s Libros des ajedrez, dados y tablas (The Book of Chess, Dice, and Tables) examined the political and social morality exemplified by the game; the use of chess allegories in specula principiis also speaks to the game’s inherent nobility. See also Daniel E. O’Sullivan,



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  41

games were most often derided for the threat they posed of totalising absorption: the players’ addiction would cause them to forsake all other activity and tasks. This preoccupation was particularly problematic for clergy, who were known to abandon their spiritual duties for the call of the board. (Among its other and more lasting edicts – including the requirement of annual confession – the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 prohibited religious from engaging in, or even observing, games of chance.27) Mannyng several times imagines instances where a truant priest neglects divine service to carouse with ‘iogeloure, / with hasadoure, or with rotoure, / [and] Hauntyst tauerne, … / To pley at þe ches or at the tablere, / Specyaly before the noun’ (1041–5). The Book of Shrift repeatedly shows both clerics and parishioners missing all or part of mass because of the allure of game, tale, and drink (28246–59, 28332–47, 28360–83, and 28442–64; cf. Handlyng Synne 4527–46). In Chaucer’s own day, John Wyclif attacked delinquent clergy for neglecting their services to indulge in dubious games and for thus contributing to the corruption of lay people. Wyclif chastises these erring brothers for their ‘ensaumple of ydelnesse and wauntounesse’ and for ‘stir[ing] lewid men to dronkenesse, ydelnesse & cursed swerynge and chydynge & fiȝttynge’.28 Wyclif’s list of corollary evils draws the familiar parallel between playing at chess or tables and over-indulgence, violence, and, most importantly, corrupted language (‘cursed swerynge and chydynge’). Addressing the mixed company of the Canterbury pilgrimage, Chaucer’s Parson similarly links gaming with these sins, especially degraded or misused language: Now comth hasardrie with his apurtenaunces, as tables and rafles, of which comth deceite, false othes, chidynges, and all ravynes, blasphemynge and reneiynge of God, and hate of his neighebores, wast of goodes, mysspendynge of tyme, and somtyme manslaughtre./ Certes, hasardours ne mowe nat been withouten greet synne whiles they haunte that craft./ Of Avarice comen eek lesynges, thefte, fals witnesse, and false othes. (CT X, 793–5)

27

28

‘Le beau jeu notable’, in Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 1–13; and Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2006), especially her discussion of Jacobus’ Liber ludo scachorum as both a model for, and agent of, civil order. Adams acknowledges the tension between the edifying nobility of chess and the tendency of many medieval players to gamble on games of chess, often with the added desultory element of dice (pp. 20–1, 47–54, 158). Bubczyk, ‘“Ludus inhonestus”’, p. 31. Within a decade of Chaucer’s penning the Duchess the bishop of Ely issued a similar ban when, in 1364, he forbade priests in his diocese from playing both dice and chess (ibid., p. 36). See also Murray, History, p. 410 n. 49. See John Wyclif, ‘The Order of Priesthood’ and ‘How the Office of Curates is Ordained of God’, in The English Works of Wyclif, ed. F. D. Matthew, EETS OS 74 (London, 1880), pp. 169 and 152, respectively.

42  B. S. W. Barootes

Compare also the Parson’s earlier discussion of the sins of the tongue (X, 580–653), where he likens those who commit ‘manye mo synnes, as wel in word as in thoght and in dede’ to ‘thise cursede hasardours in diverse contrees’ (X, 580). Gaming figures stand like gate-keepers at the opening of this excursus on corrupt and corrupting language – just as they occupy a prominent position at the close of the discourse on the linguistic fallout of avarice (X, 793–5). These same identifications hold in the secular literature of the Ricardian and Lancastrian periods. Passus V of Piers Plowman (B-text) shows the paired sins of Gluttony and Sloth frequently succumbing to the twinned temptations of storytelling and gaming.29 Gluttony admits to Repentaunce that he has often been side-tracked from a journey to church (5.297–307) ‘[f]or love of tales in tavernes’ (5.377a). Gluttony also spends much of his time at the tavern participating in a game of valuations with the labourers and minor merchants of the town (5.308–40). Sloth likewise confesses, ‘I am ocupied ech a day, halyday and oother, / With ydel tales at the ale’ (5.403–4a); rather than perform good deeds, he ‘hadde levere here an harlotrye [an obscene story] or a somer game of souters, / Or lesynges to laughen of’ (5.407–8a). Like the wayward souls the Cursor-poet condemns, Sloth foregoes Christian teaching and exempla for the balladry of the tavern: ‘I kan noght parfitly my Paternoster as the preest it syngeth, / But I kan rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf Erl of Chestre’ (5.395–6).30 The interplay of the ludic and the fictional (and the lesser sins of the tavern) appears in less religiously informed secular works, too, as in The Tale of Beryn, a fifteenth-century continuation of Chaucer’s Tales. The Merchant’s second entry in Herry Bailly’s contest – one told at a Canterbury inn called the Checker of Hope, where the Pardoner aims to put a check on his would-be mate Kitt – Beryn is the story of a young, recalcitrant gambler from Rome who loses all his possessions in a rigged game of chess only to win them back and become the ruler of the city.31 This mise-en-abyme of game and tale demonstrates once more the conceptual kinship between the hazards of idle play and the vanity of fables and fictions that pervades late medieval devotional and secular literatures.

29 30

31

All quotations are taken from William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London, 1995), B-text, cited by passus and line number. A similar condemnation of a preference for secular stories appears in the early fifteenth-­ century Dives and Pauper: ‘Þey han leuer gon to þe tauerne þan to holy chirche, leuer to heryn a tale or a song of Robyn Hood or of som rybaudye þan to heryn messe or matynys.’ See Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, EETS OS 275, 280, 323 (London, 1976–2004), p. 189. ‘The Canterbury Interlude and the Merchant’s Tale of Beryn’, in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. John M. Bowers (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992), pp. 60–196. For an investigation of ludic elements in Beryn, see Adams, Power Play, pp. 95–121.



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  43

‘In travayle ys myn ydelness’: Productive Fabulae in the Book of the Duchess The proem of Chaucer’s Duchess intervenes in this constellation of idleness, games, and fables. As the poem moves from the narrator’s initial complaint to the fable from the old clerks’ book and into the dreamscape where the Dreamer encounters his rhetorical double, the Man in Black, Chaucer works to dispel the idea that fables are closely tied to idleness and its subsidiary games. As other scholars have shown, once the Dreamer engages the Black Knight, their interaction emphasises the productive, active aspects of tales and tale-telling, for the Dreamer’s efforts to help the Black Knight depend on the dismissal of the Knight’s repetitive laments and his draughty chess allegory, and the construction of an organised narrative in their place.32 To best understand how Chaucer discounts the association of fables and idleness, we must first examine how the poem depicts idleness in the Dreamer-­ narrator and the Man in Black. Michael St John and Lears both comment on how these figures manifest traditional signs of sloth. Whereas St John, following D. W. Robertson, Jr, marks only the Man in Black as a slothful sinner, Lears reads the narrator and the Black Knight as embodying two separate aspects of sloth. In this more nuanced reading, the narrator represents a ‘non-creative humanist melancholia’, which Lears likens to Petrarch’s concept of accidia, and the Knight’s idle state is more akin to the theological notion of acedia or spiritual sloth.33 Without discounting Lears’ reading, which rightly acknowledges the penitential and confessional resonances in Chaucer’s poem, I want to focus instead on the similarities between the idleness of the Man in Black and the narrator.34 In the Book of the Duchess, idleness is presented as a circular process, one that demands an expenditure of emotional and intellectual energy but achieves nothing. The narrator’s sad state is emblematised by his ‘many an ydel thoght’ (4), which sit at the fulcrum of an unending cycle of sorrow and insomnia: his ‘defaute of slepe’ is caused by these idle thoughts born of his ‘sorwful ymaginacioun’; the lack of sleep consequently leads to further distress and, we can safely assume, more idle thoughts. In the dream, the Man in Black’s misery likewise orbits a core of dense solipsism, the gravity of which prevents his mind from moving beyond his immediate grief 32

33

34

See, for instance, John Lawlor, ‘The Pattern of Consolation in The Book of the Duchess’, Speculum 31/4 (1956), 626–48; and Diane M. Ross, ‘The Play of Genres in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 19/1 (1984), 1–13. Michael St John, Chaucer’s Dream Visions: Courtliness and Individual Identity (Burlington, VT, 2000), pp. 36–8; Lears, ‘Something from Nothing’, pp. 209–12. Cf. D. W. Robertson, Jr, ‘The Historical Setting of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, in Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr, ed. John Mahoney and John Esten Keller (Chapel Hill, NC, 1965), pp. 169–95. On the role of penitential forms in the Book of the Duchess, see R. A. Shoaf, ‘“Mutatio Amoris”: “Penitentia” and the Form of The Book of the Duchess’, Genre 14 (1981), 163–89.

44  B. S. W. Barootes

and reaching consolation. There is an element of motion in these two idling minds, but it quickly becomes a sort of entropic dynamism, one that traps the idler in a closed circuit of sorrow. We have seen a comparable concept at work in the devotional and penitential texts discussed above: in the Book of Shrift, the Ayenbite, and even Piers Plowman, sinners enter a cycle of sloth when they turn aside from a path of spiritual devotion to pursue the earthly pleasures of game and story; and Augustine asserts that profane fables and juvenile sport are two types of vestigia errantes (wandering steps). Besides drawing on traditional symptoms of melancholy and lovesickness, Chaucer emphasises the twisted nature of each man’s idleness in poetic form. The narrator’s complaint manifests the insomniac’s eddying stasis through the combination of line breaks and a division of sense in the middle of couplets. Consider the division of the verse paragraphs in lines 15 and 16: For sorwful ymagynacioun Ys alway hooly in my mynde. And wel ye woot, agaynes kynde Hyt were to liven in thys wyse

(14–17)

Here the end of the sentence about the narrator’s ‘sorwful ymagynacioun’ dominating his mind (14–15) gives way to a renewed appraisal of the unnaturalness of his situation (16–17). The break between lines 29 and 30 functions in the same fashion, recharging the speaker’s plaintive voice as he simultaneously repeats and expands on his plight: Suche fantasies ben in myn hede So I not what is best to doo. But men myght axe me why soo I may not slepe and what me is.

(28–31)

The sense of inescapable inertia can also be seen in the passage’s careful use of repetition, alliteration and assonance, and internal rhyme. The first lines of the proem, like the opening of Froissart’s Paradys d’amour on which they are modelled, turn on a series of sonic echoes and slippages: I have gret wonder, be this lyght, How that I lyve, for day ne nyght I may nat slepe wel nygh nought[.]

(1–3)

To take but a few examples from the first sentence: the liquid and vowel combination of lyght in the first line returns in lyve in the second, and both words represent antitheses of the Narrator’s sad state; the nyght at the end of the second line similarly twists into the noght of the third, smudging the borders of the couplets, even as the consonance of nyght and nygh tightens the lines internally.



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  45

The mournful Man in Black, physically stilled and looking earthward under the great oak tree (445–7, 461), also demonstrates an idleness figured in cyclical terms. The Knight is trapped in the torment of ‘[a]lway deynge and be not ded’ (588), a phrase which is, as Ardis Butterfield suggests, a synecdoche for his perpetual suffering.35 The near-inexhaustible series of inversions he endures (599–617) likewise suggests a sense of in situ dynamism that parallels the narrator’s complaint in the proem, just as the Man’s heavy repetition of ‘sorwe’ twists and tightens his mourning mind around the core of his loss. As Shoaf puts it, the Black Knight’s mind is ‘a labyrinth of rhetoric which inhibits change’.36 His two lyrics capture the whirling nature of his condition as well. Both intercalated songs depend on a small set of rhymes, patterns which interrupt the flow of the main narrative’s octosyllabic couplets. The first, mournful lyric (475–86) is particularly indicative of the closed circuit of grief that holds the Knight. As soon as he concludes his song he plunges deeper into a silent, solipsistic sorrow: ‘he spak noght, / But argued with his owne thoght, / And in hys wyt disputed faste / Why and how hys lyf myght laste’ (503–6). Like the narrator, the Man in Black is ‘a mased thyng’ (12). The repetitive, cyclical, and unproductive forms of idleness exhibited by the Narrator and the Knight are counteracted by story (fable). Contrary to the negative depictions in the penitential manuals, from their first mention in the BD proem fables are identified with activity and productivity. Not only are fables juxtaposed to the idling play of chess and tables at lines 51–2, but the narrator’s very recourse to the book suggests a vital step out of the cycle of idleness, for the decision to take down a book is the first real deed in the poem. Up until line 44, the only actions performed by, or otherwise associated with, the narrator are bound up with his ongoing torment and sleeplessness: ‘I take no kep / Of nothing’ (6–7), ‘I ne may … / Slepe’ (22–3; cf. 3), ‘I holde hit be a sicknesse’ (36); his so-called actions are, in effect, merely repetitive reflections on and of his condition. The most common verb in this passage, haven, is repeatedly (and paradoxically) linked to absence and nothingness: ‘I have so many an ydel thoght’ (4), ‘I have felynge in nothyng’ (11), and ‘I have lost al lustyhede’ (27). The narrator is also twice rendered a passive object or vessel: he laments that ‘sorwful ymagynacioun / Ys alway hooly in my mynde’ (14–15), and that ‘[s]uche fantasies ben in myn hede’ (28). As this phrasing makes clear, the troubled narrator is subordinate to the powerful mental disturbances that occupy him. The selection of the particular book and the command to the ‘oon’ to fetch it (47–8), by contrast, require both agency and action, just as the very decision to read – ‘I will do this thing’ – counters the listlessness exhibited in his idle, melancholy state. The positive effects of this undertaking begin immediately. As the parallel diction and syntax make 35 36

Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 33–60 (at p. 52). Shoaf, ‘“Mutatio Amoris”’, p. 164.

46  B. S. W. Barootes

clear, the narrator’s initial, rather passive intention ‘[t]o rede and drive the night away’ (49) is supplanted by the clerks’ more ambitious and remedial purpose ‘[t]o rede and for to be in minde’ (55) of a better time. The narrator’s reaction to the story of Seys and Alcione likewise demonstrates a stirring of emotion and action that heretofore has been absent in him.37 Part way through relaying the tale, he pauses to comment on the queen’s grief: Such sorowe this lady to her tok That trewly I, that made this book, Had such pittee and such rowthe To rede hir sorwe that, by my trowthe, I ferde the worse all the morwe Aftir to thenken on hir sorwe.

(95–100)

Many scholars take the narrator’s aside, like his subsequent resolution to bribe the gods to put him to sleep (231–69), as an indication of his simple-­ mindedness or superficiality.38 But this reading misses an important point: the narrator’s response is, in and of itself, significant. This is a man who, not 90 lines earlier, stated, ‘Ne me nys nothyng leef nor looth’ (8); at the outset of the proem, he is incapable of feeling anything beyond an empty heaviness, an anxious lethargy that obviates any development or improvement of his condition. The pathetic story of marital love and loss – a story of ‘thinges smale’, ‘[o]f quenes lives, and of kinges’ – can thus be read as a catalyst, if not a complete solution. It opens the possibility for the return of an emotional and intellectual vitality that not only enables the narrator to escape his insomnia and numbness but prepares him for the fresh burst of productivity when he awakens from the dream and picks up his pen. Fables and their salvific influence appear in the dream as well. When the Dreamer awakens in the bright chamber on a May morning, he remarks on the frescos and stained-glass depictions of the Romance of the Rose and the Matter of Troy (321–34), works which represent the two pillars of courtly literature. As Robert Edwards suggests, the chamber can be read as a mani-

37 38

Cf. A. J. Minnis with V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995), p. 149. See, for example, Joerg O. Fichte, ‘The Book of the Duchess – a Consolation?’, Studia Neophilologica 45 (1973), 53–67; and St John, Chaucer’s Dream Visions, pp. 24–5. Minnis states that the narrator experiences the Alcione story at such a remove that he treats it ‘in a detached, even rather jocular, fashion’ (Oxford Guides, p. 116). John Fyler writes that the narrator’s response, while sympathetic, remains focused on his own troubles, that his ‘self-pointing’ lines reveal ‘a man too obsessed with his own concerns’ (Chaucer and Ovid [New Haven, CT, 1979], p. 70). Fyler further insists that the ‘romaunce’ does not succeed in putting the narrator ‘in minde’ of the golden past – that it is no more than a fairy tale (p. 71), an empty fabula like those that Macrobius disdains.



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  47

festation of an ideal book,39 but one that is, we must note, decidedly secular (even profane), an extension of the romaunce on which the narrator sleeps (cf. 274–5; 1325–9). In the Dreamer’s description, these elevated tales are couched between the ‘glade gilde stremes’ (338) of light that dispel the fogginess of the narrator’s insomnia and the sweet birdsong ringing throughout the chamber (295–320), the harmonious effect of which recalls the fable-book’s ability to put a reader ‘in minde, / While men loved the lawe of kinde’. The literary images are thus linked with the restorative and healing qualities of the dream’s locus amoenus. As the Alcione tale prompts the narrator to action (however comical), so the chamber readies him to rise and head out ‘[a] noon ryght’ (354) to join the hunt led by that evocative figure of romance, Octovyen (368).40 The most significant instance of active, productive, and restorative fables in the Book of the Duchess is, of course, the Man in Black’s story of his love for Lady White. As many critics have noted, the Knight’s admission of White’s death – ‘She ys ded’ (1309) – releases him from the entropic grip of his grief and allows him ‘homwarde for to ryde’ (1315).41 Shoaf, for example, comments that the narrative is, in this respect, the Knight’s ‘romaunce’, and only the full confessional account of the affair, from start to painful finish, can lift him out of the vicious cycle of mourning.42 It remains to consider the dismissal of the chess-game conceit used by the Knight to relate his loss of White (618–19, 652–709), for the conclusion of this brief scene marks a subtle but important first stage of the Knight’s trajectory to consolation. What is more, this relegation is predicated on the distinction that I have argued Chaucer enforces between fables and idle games: the chess conceit, which emblematises the Man in Black’s unproductive mourning, is contrasted to, and replaced by, the direct, literal tale of love and loss that the Man subsequently tells. Several critics have addressed Chaucer’s use of chess in his first dream-­ vision, the only instance in his corpus that exhibits detailed concern with the game. The earliest analyses of chess in Chaucer tend to insist he had little to no direct knowledge of the game but garnered it from the Roman de la Rose. Franklin D. Cooley points out, for instance, that the loss of a fers does not 39 40

41

42

Robert R. Edwards, The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in the Early Narratives (Durham, NC, 1989), pp. 1–2. See, for instance, Helen Phillips, ‘Structure and Consolation in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 16/2 (1981), 107–18 (at p. 113). On the healing potential of hunting, particularly as a remedy for melancholy and idleness, see Minnis et al., Oxford Guides, pp. 118, 140–1, 149. G. L. Kittredge was the first to suggest the ‘talking-cure’ reading of the Dreamer’s encounter with the Man in Black. See Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1915), p. 52; cf. Lawlor, ‘The Pattern of Consolation’. More recently, see Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy’; and Robert R. Edwards, ‘The Book of the Duchess and the Beginnings of Chaucer’s Narrative’, New Literary History 13 (1982), 189–204. Shoaf, ‘“Mutatio Amoris”’, pp. 166–8, 186 n. 9.

48  B. S. W. Barootes

mean one has lost the game, and Margaret Connolly suggests this confusion is indicative of Chaucer’s lack of familiarity with both the rules of chess and the moralised commentaries on the game.43 More recently, Jenny Adams has convincingly demonstrated that the Duchess chess game is ‘in dialogue with chess scenes from popular French and English romances as well as with fourteenth-century chess practices’.44 Adams stresses in particular the ignoble link between chess and gambling, citing the Man in Black’s loss of White in the game with Fortune. To press this point further, in the context of the present study: not only is the Knight’s chess metaphor clumsy, it also associates the Man with deplorable and idle pastimes. (That the Knight is a frequent player of chess and well-versed in its lore is indicated by his reference to the founding of the game by Athalus [662–4] and his allusion to the ‘jeupardyes’, or chess diagrams and problems, of Pythagoras [665–9].) The Dreamer’s posture of misunderstanding (714–19, 721–5) tactfully urges the Knight to jettison the chess conceit, with its connotations of idleness and gambling, and take up the productive labour of storytelling. In fact, the Dreamer subtly encourages the Man along this path by picking up and expanding on the Knight’s allusion to Tantalus (709) when he offers a catalogue of sorrowful lovers from old fables (726–39). With this additional prompt fresh in mind, the Dreamer proceeds to ask the Man to tell him ‘al hooly / In what wyse, how, why, and wherefore / That ye have thus youre blysse lore’ (746–8). The Black Knight is thus guided onto the straight path of narrative-building and, with the occasional corrective prod from the questioning Dreamer, produces a tale that organises and structures his grief in such a way that he is able to move out of and beyond it. Indeed, the Man in Black’s eventual restoration to an active life confirms that fables are ‘better play / Then playe either at ches or tables’ (50–1). Chaucer’s intervention in the Book of the Duchess does not mark the last late medieval engagement with the tables-fables rhyme as it appears in the vernacular penitential manuals. In closing, I want to consider the latest Middle English instances of the tables-fable pair that I have found. The rhyme appears twice in The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, John Lydgate’s c. 1426 translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine (c. 1330). Lydgate’s use of the rhyming pair, I believe, registers both of the divergent treatments of fables discussed above, demonstrating what I suggest 43

44

See, for instance, Franklin D. Cooley, ‘Two Notes on the Chess Terms in the Book of the Duchess’, MLN 63/1 (1948), 30–5; and Margaret Connolly, ‘Chaucer and Chess’, ChR 29/1 (1994), 40–4. Guillemette Bolens and Paul Beekman Taylor, ‘The Game of Chess in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, ChR 32/4 (1998), 325–34, argue that the errors in the chess conceit are indicative of the Man in Black’s confused state and clumsy rhetoric rather than a shortcoming on Chaucer’s part. Jenny Adams, ‘Pawn Takes Knight’s Queen: Playing with Chess in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 34/2 (1999), 125–38 (at pp. 128–9). She suggests parallels with the romances Garin de Montglane and Huon de Bordeaux as well as the pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula.



Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  49

is a particularly English concern with the moral perception of secular storytelling. About midway through his visionary journey, the Pilgrim asks the damsel Idleness the way to Jerusalem. Lady Idleness, who studies ‘above al other thynges, / Of romauncys ffondyd on lesynges’ (11651–2), directs him to the Highway of Pleasure, where she teaches travellers to Endyte lettrys, & songys make Vp-on the glade somerys dayes, Balladys, Roundelays, vyrelayes. … And to revelle at taverne, Wyth al merthe & mellodye, On rebube and on symphonye; To spende al the day in ffablys, Pleye at the ches, pley at the tablys, At treygobet & tregetrye, In karyyng & in Iogolory (11612–14, 11618–24)45

The association of fables with the chess, tables, and dice games (treygobet) of the slothful tavern appears to be Lydgate’s own insertion. While the corresponding lines in de Deguileville’s original point to an element of deceit or falsehood (tricherie) in the pastimes, they make no direct mention of stories, tales, or fables: Dont long le parlement seroit Qui toutes dire les voulroit Et la leur fois ie veoir danseurs Jeux de basteaulx et de iougleurs Jeux de tables et deschiquiers De boulles et de mereilliers De cartes ieux de tricherie Et de mainte autre muserie (6757–64)46

Lydgate certainly knew the Book of the Duchess: his Complaynte of a Loveres Lyfe, written in the early years of the fifteenth century, depends heavily on Chaucer’s poem. For his addition of fables to the list of Idleness’s lessons, 45

46

John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 3 vols, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS OS 77, 83, 92 (London, 1899–1904). On the attribution to Lydgate, see Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), p. 174, and Richard Firth Green, ‘Lydgate and Deguileville Once More’, Notes & Queries 223 (1978), 105–6. These lines from de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage (quoted in Furnivall’s edition) have been checked against, and transcribed from, the 1511 edition by Antoine Vérard, Pèlerinage de lhomme, fol. 45r (cf. Furnivall, ed., vol. 3, p. 678). A digitized version of Bibliothèque nationale de France’s copy can be viewed at the BnF’s Gallica website , accessed 1 December 2017.

50  B. S. W. Barootes

however, he seems here to be drawing on the presentation of idle fables in the English penitential manuals rather than Chaucer’s efforts to distinguish between romances and idle games. The encounter with Idleness echoes an earlier conversation with Youth. The feathered young lady describes to the Pilgrim the ways in which she amuses herself (11140ff). Among her many pastimes, she lists hunting and fishing as well as ‘clymb[ing] trees oueral / In gardyns wher the ffrut ys good’ (11152–3) – a nod, perhaps, to one of Augustine’s vestigia errantes. Youth also loves somtyme pleyen at the bowlys; Among, shetyn at bessellys, And affter pleyn at the merellys, Now at the dees, in my yong age, Bothe at hassard & passage; Now at the ches, now at the tablys, Rede no storyes but on ffablys, On thyn that ys nat worth a lek[.]

(11190–8)

As in the case of Idleness’s lines quoted above, Lydgate’s French source contains no such reference to stories or fables.47 Again, the translator is introducing the association between profane texts and vain games. All this is not to say, of course, that the Monk of Bury was on-side with the penitential manuals’ dismissal of secular fables; Lydgate certainly spent plenty of time telling tales of ‘many other thinges smale’. However, this interpolation raises (at least) two important possibilities. First, it shows that Chaucer was not alone among late medieval English secular poets in engaging with the suggestive tables-fables rhyme. His revival and recuperation of this early-fourteenth-century rhyming pair in the Duchess may have informed fifteenth-century uses. Second, it suggests that Lydgate (whether he believed it or not) saw how significant the association of fables with the idle games of chess and tables was for insular devotional texts – so much so that he incorporates it into his Englishing of the French Pèlerinage.

47

In Deguileville’s original, the conversation with Jeunece comes much later than the encounter with Idleness. See lines 11803–55, especially lines 11842–8. Cf. Furnivall’s notes to his edition of Lydgate, vol. 3, pp. 675–7.

3 ‘Noon other werke’: The Work of Sleep in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess REBECCA DAVIS

Dream-visions are perhaps the most self-reflexive of medieval literary genres. They purport to open a window into the minds, indeed, to bare the very souls of their narrators, if not those of the authors themselves. Moreover, in exploring the conditions of their genesis and the materials out of which they are made, dream-visions are an intensely metafictional genre.1 As Helen Phillips and Nick Havely observe in the introduction to their edition of Chaucer’s dream-visions, ‘Late-medieval poets seem less interested in fictional dreams as mirrors of real-life dreaming than as mirrors of the imagination, consciousness and literary composition.’2 But what about the sleep that precedes dreams? Are representations of sleep merely a literary precondition that mimics the physiological one, a purely conventional stage through which narrators must pass in these texts? If so, why are some literary dreams prefaced by lengthy representations of sleep (and sometimes, as in Book of the Duchess, its ‘defaute’ [5]) while others mention it only in passing or not at all? In this essay I will explore some of the ways in which sleep serves as a particularly useful vehicle for poets whose metafictions sought to probe the boundary between physical and mental phenomena. In ‘Sleep, Dreams, and Poetry in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Lisa Kiser observes that ‘no one has yet satisfactorily explained why this Chaucerian persona is introduced in a belabored and self-conscious passage on his sleeplessness, a passage that appears to most readers to act as a lengthy digression instead of a true prologue to the poem’s issues and theme’.3 Kiser 1

2 3

On dream visions and metafiction, see A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 5–6, 88–9; Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 130–40; Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, ed. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely (London, 1997), pp. 15–16. On Chaucer’s development of ‘psychological causation’ in his dream visions, see Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, pp. 55–62. Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, ed. Phillips and Havely, p. 15. Lisa J. Kiser, ‘Sleep, Dreams, and Poetry in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Papers on Language and Literature 19 (1983), 3–12 (at pp. 3–4).

52  Rebecca Davis

argues that the theme of sleeplessness unifies the poem around a metaliterary concern. ‘If, as many critics have suggested, dreams are metaphors for the activities and results of the poetic imagination in medieval courtly works, then Chaucer’s sleeplessness in the first lines of this poem represents not only his failure to dream, but also his inability to write’, Kiser suggests. ‘For a poet, whose business is to create well and to create often, sleeplessness results in a poetically barren state of mind, a period of disturbingly unproductive idleness.’4 Here I wish to build on Kiser’s insights about the metafictional import of sleep in Book of the Duchess. ‘Falling asleep’, she observes, ‘is actually the first step towards fulfilling a poet’s role.’5 But, while Kiser shows that Chaucer associates sleeplessness with a lack of creative productivity and, conversely, that he associates sleeping with writing, she does not address the question of why sleep in particular is so fecund. What particular qualities or mechanisms give sleep its potential to facilitate creative output? I will argue that Chaucer not only represents sleep as ‘work’ but understands it to do a certain kind of epistemological and imaginative work that underwrites the craft of poetry-­ making. Further, I suggest that Chaucer develops this conception of sleep at least in part from his engagement with Machaut’s Livre de la fonteinne amoreuse, one of the unnamed sources for Book of the Duchess.6 In these texts, investigations of sleep are central to their authors’ theories of mind, which are, in turn, the basis of their literary theories. As a bodily need that passivizes the body and propels the consciousness inward, sleep focuses attention on a version of what contemporary philosophy calls the ‘mind–body problem’: put broadly, what is the relationship between matter and spirit, between physical and mental phenomena, and how do the two realms interact with and influence one another?7 Reading and writing, which is to say, the making of poetry, necessarily involves a negotiation of the mind–body problem, both with respect to entering one’s own mind and to knowing the minds of others. In Chaucer’s and Machaut’s dream-visions, I will argue, sleep is a vehicle for crossing from the realm of physical phenomena into the realm of the mind and back again. But, as an embodied experience, sleep is also the site of that 4 5 6

7

Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. Machaut’s influence on the Book of the Duchess is widely documented. See, for example, Barbara Nolan, ‘The Art of Expropriation: Chaucer’s Narrator in Book of the Duchess’, in New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, ed. Donald M. Rose (Norman, OK, 1981), pp. 203–22; Barry Windeatt, Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (London, 1982); and Alastair Minnis with V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995), pp. 100–12. As Kirk Ludwig observes, in the field of philosophy the phrase ‘mind–body problem’ is not used ‘univocally’ (p. 31). I borrow his formulation of the problem in the question above. See Ludwig, ‘The Mind–Body Problem: An Overview’, in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, ed. Stephen P. Stich and Ted A. Warfield (London, 2003), pp. 1–46 (at p. 1).



The Work of Sleep in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess  53

crossing, or, we might say, the body remains present in that crossing; rather than emphasize the separability and distinction of body and mind, sleep is a reminder of their entanglement, that human beings are bodies with minds and minds with bodies. For Chaucer, these facts have literary consequences and Book of the Duchess is an early attempt to negotiate them. Some of these claims can be made clearer through a key textual example. In the frame story that prefaces the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s sleepless narrator reads an account of the Ovidian story of Ceyx and Alcyone.8 Grieving for her husband Ceyx’s apparent but unconfirmed death at sea, Alcyone asks Juno for ‘grace to slepe and mete’ (118). We may understand the ‘grace’ she seeks both as a gift – the divine favor that her prayer entreats – and in a broader sense as an exception, a ‘time of grace’ that opens up a space of epistemic possibility.9 More than simply a good night’s rest, Alcyone seeks ‘[i]n … slep som certeyn sweven / Wherthourgh that [she] may knowen even / Whether [her] lord be quyk or ded’ (119–21). Barring Ceyx’s return or some other form of direct knowledge of his condition, Alcyone understands sleep, and the dreams that state engenders, as the next best means to gain reliable information about Ceyx’s fate. Alcyone’s confidence in the mediatory power of sleep and dreams may strike us as naïve; however, the metaliterary implications of her plea become clear in the context of the lines directly preceding it. Chaucer places this episode immediately after a passage in which the narrator – here identifying himself not only as a reader but as a maker of books – interrupts his account of the story with an exclamation of its power to affect him. Alcyone suffered such sorrow, he avows: That trewly I, that made this book, Had such pittee and such rowthe To rede hir sorwe that, by my trowthe, I ferde the worse al the morwe Aftir to thenken on hir sorwe.

(96–100)

On the one hand, these lines evince an incongruity of emotional response that is entirely in keeping with the narrator’s propensity for failed understandings throughout Book of the Duchess. The enormity of Alcyone’s grief at the loss 8 9

The story of Ceyx and Alcyone appears in Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.410–748. Chaucer likely also knew the French and Latin moralizations of Ovid. Langland associates sleep and grace in Piers Plowman when, having scorned Reason, the dreamer wakes abruptly: ‘slepyng hadde I grace / To wite what dowel is, ac wakyng neuere’ (B, passus 11, lines 408–9, quoted from Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-well, Do-better and Do-best: Piers Plowman, the B version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson [London and Berkeley, CA, 1988]). See David F. Johnson, ‘“In somnium, in visionem”: The Figurative Significance of Sleep in Piers Plowman’, in Loyal Letters: Studies on Mediaeval Alliterative Poetry and Prose, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1994), pp. 239–60.

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of her husband, compounded by her inability to confirm the details of his fate, causes the narrator to feel bad (‘I ferde the worse’) for a whole day after reading about it. Alcyone’s loss, unfathomably painful to her, apparently can be reckoned: it amounts to one day of readerly sympathy. But, on the other hand, Chaucer’s account of the narrator’s response makes a remarkable claim for the power of storytelling: reading makes something happen. The story of Alcyone’s suffering produces real emotions in the narrator, even if they only last a day. Moreover, the account of Alycone’s ‘sorwe’ doesn’t remain in the book, but, having ‘rede hir sorwe’, the narrator is able to revisit it ‘al the morwe / Aftir’, to continue to ‘thenken’ on her suffering. The book’s account of Alcyone’s suffering has somehow become part of the narrator’s own mental space. In this context, Alcyone’s ensuing prayer for knowledge through sleep and dreams appears to be in sympathy with the narrator’s testament to the efficacy of fiction: the book he reads and the dream she desires to experience both ‘play out’ as mental phenomena but then cross the mind–body barrier to manifest meaningful and lasting effects in the waking world. In what follows, I explore these dynamics further by examining Morpheus’s role in the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, first in Chaucer’s version and then by comparison with Machaut’s Fonteinne. By surveying the medieval discourses of sleep, which comprise negative as well as positive assessments of its effects, I aim to contextualize these two poets’ representations of its metafictional work as a facilitator of boundary crossings. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on the association of sleep and death to consider how a metafictional reading of sleep’s work elucidates the consolatory dynamic of Book of the Duchess.

‘Felynge in nothynge’: Entering and Leaving the Body in Sleep Like the narrator of the Book of the Duchess, Juno, too, takes pity on Alcyone. She soon grants her wish – ‘the dede slep / Fil on hir’ (127–8) – and sends her messenger to rouse Morpheus, ‘the god of slep’ (137). Here Chaucer famously diverges from his sources. While in Ovid’s and Machaut’s versions Alcyone’s vision of Ceyx is a product of the god’s mysterious powers of illusion, Chaucer’s version takes a more material, even mechanical cast as Juno instructs Morpheus to ‘take up’ and ‘crepe into’ Ceyx’s actual body (142, 144). Ironically, through this ‘quickening’ of Ceyx’s corpse, Morpheus ‘shewe[s]’ Alcyone incontrovertible proof that Ceyx is in fact ‘ded’ (147, 204). Some have read Chaucer’s apparently crude emphasis on the material body as a sign of diminished art. Kiser, for example, refers to Morpheus’s work as a ‘cheap trick’, and suggests that Chaucer wishes to portray the god as a foil to his own superior form of artistry.10 But reading this episode

10

Kiser, ‘Sleep, Dreams, and Poetry’, p. 6.



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alongside Machaut’s treatment of it in the Fonteinne offers another view of Chaucer’s representation of Morpheus’s work. Rather than a foil for his own poetic achievements, Chaucer’s Morpheus models an art that is grounded in the material world, in corporeal and concrete things. Sleeping, for Chaucer, represents the inescapable materiality of fiction, which is to say, both the capacity of matter and its limitations. Chaucer characterizes sleep as a kind of ‘work’ when Juno’s messenger arrives in Morpheus’s cave, where the god lies sleeping alongside Eclympasteyr, his ‘heyr’ (168). Although Chaucer does not specifically mention the ‘slepy thousand sones’ that, following Ovid, populate his description of the cave in the House of Fame (line 75),11 we are given to understand that Morpheus and Eclympasteyr do have company in their slumber: ‘Somme henge her chyn upon hir brest / And slept upryght, hir hed yhed, / And somme lay naked in her bed / And slepe whiles the dayes laste’ (174–7). Indeed, although their activity is predicated upon infinite ‘leyser’, sleep is something of a competitive sport in Morpheus’s cave as, by their snoring, they ‘envye who myghte slepe best’ (173). For all its association with leisure, sleeping is serious business here. Indeed, Morpheus and his crowd are professional sleepers: they ‘slep’, Chaucer writes, ‘and dide noon other werk’ (169). This line suggests a powerful ambiguity about sleep, both as it is represented in Chaucer’s works and in its cultural significance more broadly. What does it mean to suggest that Morpheus and his kin sleep and do no ‘other’ work? Does it mean that they simply do no work, since sleeping surely can’t be considered work, can it? Or do these lines rather declare that sleep is a kind of work? To say that sleep is work certainly seems counterintuitive and, indeed, medieval representations of sleep, like modern ones, often associate sleeping with idleness and sloth, particularly when it is unregulated. Chaucer records this conventional wisdom in the Melibee: ‘For thise causes seith Caton, “Waketh and enclyneth nat yow over-muchel for to slepe, for over-muchel reste norisseth and causeth manye vices”’ (CT VII, 1594), and, likewise, in the Parson’s Tale: ‘Slepynge longe in greet quiete is eek a greet norice to Leccherie’ (X, 952). Both of these Chaucerian examples fit neatly within a tradition that Megan Leitch traces from late medieval secular romance to Shakespeare in which representations of ‘literary sleep, both physical and metaphorical’, advance an ‘ethical discourse’ that closely follows the prescriptions of medieval dietaries and conduct manuals.12 Meridial and post-prandial sleep were considered particularly dangerous, even unnatural, in the conduct 11 12

The God of Sleep has a thousand sons in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (11.633–43) and a thousand sons and daughters in Machaut’s Fonteinne (627, 635). Leitch, ‘“Grete Luste to Slepe”: Somatic Ethics and the Sleep of Romance from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Shakespeare’, Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32/1 (2015), 103–28 (at p. 104).

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literature. Middle English romances frequently level censure at characters who sleep at inappropriate times, after meals, or overmuch. ‘Sleep’, Leitch writes, ‘was something that required a great deal of thought and care. Courtly persons needed to be conscientious about how they performed their loss of consciousness.’13 Leitch’s survey carefully establishes the ‘premodern investment in sleep’, illustrating its ‘cultural and cognitive importance’ in the period.14 But, for Leitch, the ‘investment’ is by and large a negative one, for in the texts she examines sleep is treated as a dangerous, if necessary, condition of embodiment. Sleep threatens to reduce the human being to mere body, to animal existence. This association of sleep with ‘unthinking’ flesh emerges, too, in the exegetical tradition, which interprets instances of sleep in the Bible as signs of ‘spiritual slumber’ or acedia, a soul-imperiling lack of vigilance wherein the higher faculties of the human mind fail to ‘keep watch’.15 Other medieval sources, however, while maintaining the association of sleeping and the condition of embodiment, offer a more positive assessment of its ‘work’. For example, while sleep is ‘norice to Leccherie’ in the Parson’s Tale (X, 952), it is hailed as ‘norice of digestioun’ in the Squire’s Tale (V, 347).16 The encyclopedic tradition, compiling a range of authorities, is particularly interested in what we might call the restorative work of sleep.17 Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, translated into Middle English in the last quarter of the fourteenth century by John Trevisa, praises the ‘profite that is in slepe’: ‘for if the slepe is kinde and temperat, it doth to the body ful mony profitis and fele … and nameliche for thanne is good digestioun and purid thing departid fro thing that is vnpured.’18 We see again in these lines of praise a certain lingering anxiety about sleep’s regulation – the implication that sleep might be unnatural and immoderate as well as ‘kinde and temperat’ – but in the encyclopedic tradition the vital restorative function of sleep by and large eclipses any concerns about its mismanagement. Extolling the natural benefits of sleep, for example, Bartholomaeus 13 14 15 16 17

18

Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 105. For a fuller discussion of exegetical views of the benefits and hazards of sleep, see Johnson, ‘“In somnium, in visionem”’, and Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, pp. 35–56. The Riverside Chaucer notes that the personification of sleep as a ‘norice’ is ‘possibly proverbial’ but not recorded prior to Chaucer (p. 894). In a commentary on Aristotle’s definition of sleep, Simon Morgan Wortham observes the paradox that sleep is defined by waking and perception: ‘Sleep is not merely the privation of wakefulness, but also its necessary supplement … Sense perception requires its own interruption in order to function effectively. This bout of remission … is therefore considered restorative.’ See Wortham, The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy (London, 2013), pp. 19–20. John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour and Gabriel M. Liegey, 3 vols (Oxford, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 334–5.



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cites Augustine’s opinion in the De anima that sleep is not a privation, like blindness, but a ‘kyndelich disposicioun’ that ‘helpith and comfortith kinde, and is kyndeliche as wakinge is kindeliche’.19 Although it can be misused, in these sources sleep is an unqualified good, as natural as waking and a necessary complement to it. Insomnia or disrupted sleep are therefore considered unnatural,20 indeed a threat to life itself, as Chaucer’s narrator observes in voicing his complaint at the beginning of Book of the Duchess: And wel ye woot, agaynes kynde Hyt were to lyven in thys wyse, For nature wolde nat suffyse To noon erthly creature Nat longe tyme to endure Withoute slep and be in sorwe.

(16–21)

Thus, in each of these excerpts, while sleep is recognized as ‘kynde’, a bodily need, and therefore a sign of potential vulnerability, it also promotes mental well-being, revealing that body and mind depend on one another for health. But how does sleep achieve its restorative work? And what do medieval understandings of the operations of sleep suggest about its metaliterary value for Chaucer and other theorists of dream-visions? In what follows I will suggest that the answers to these two questions are interconnected. Sleep arouses anxiety in the moral tradition because it facilitates boundary crossings. As Leitch’s study suggests, sleep becomes unethical when it is unregulated or intemperate. Meridial sleep is transgressive, for example, because it confuses nighttime and daytime activities. Inappropriate sleep is also the byproduct of other forms of excess, such as eating and drinking too much.21 But if sleep is a condition that produces occasions for sin, indeed positively nourishes it, the same qualities that make sleep dangerous in moral and ethical realms engender creativity and inspiration in poetic and spiritual ones. Sleep acts like a fulcrum between the body and the mind. It points in both directions at once. As we have seen, sleep is a condition of embodiment. But it is also a suspension of sense-perception that propels the sleeping 19 20

21

Ibid., vol. 1, p. 331. Leitch, ‘“Grete Luste to Slepe”’, pp. 123–8, explores how the ‘ruptured’ sleep of Shakespeare’s insomniac machiavels breaks down these characters’ carefully managed boundaries between outer appearance and inner truth: ‘like a dramatic soliloquy, the troubled sleep of Shakespearean murderers tells the audience what the character really thinks or means’ (p. 127). See, for example, Langland’s representation of Sloth and Gluttony in the tavern scene in B, passus 5. Both indulge in excesses of consumption followed by sleep. Leitch, ‘“Grete Luste to Slepe”’, observes: ‘Both Sloth and Glutton sleep during the daytime, which, as in the courtesy books and dietaries, constitutes a lack of temperance and a form of idleness frowned upon both socially and spiritually’ (pp. 111–12).

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person if not fully ‘out’ of the body nevertheless into an interiorized space of consciousness where dreams occur. Bartholomaeus describes loss of feeling as one of the chief characteristics of sleep, citing Aristotle, ‘The vertu of felinge is ibounde in sleepe’, and Augustine, ‘Slepe is a kyndeliche vnfelingenesse comyn to the body and to the soule.’22 Perhaps curiously given this context, the insomniac narrator of Book of the Duchess also complains that he’s lost feeling, that is, his very appetite for life, not in sleep, but due to lack of sleep: I take no kep Of nothing, how hyt cometh or gooth, Ne me nys nothyng leef nor looth. Al is ylyche good to me – Joye or sorowe, wherso hyt be – For I have felynge in nothyng …

(6–11, my emphasis)

The narrator’s insomnia is ‘agaynes kynde’ (16) because it produces a deadening in the waking state that mimics the condition of sleep but without any of its restorative effects. The sense-deadening effect of sleep suspends the body’s claims on consciousness and leads to an enlivened interiority. In literary visions, sleep is a vehicle precisely in the sense that it facilitates conditions of transport and boundary-crossing, including the crossing from an external to an internal focus. As Spearing observes, the genre of the dream-vision operates as a kind of anomaly within the Western tradition because its focus turns from action and engagement with the world to inward retreat and contemplation. ‘[F]rom the time of the Homeric poems down to the modern novel’, he writes, ‘the scene of the great bulk of Western literature has not been the internal world of the mind, in which dreams transact themselves, but the outer, public world of objective reality.’23 Spearing connects the medieval dream-vision to the visions of seers in primitive societies, whose power to ‘see’ paradoxically derives from ‘state[s] of trance or ecstasy, in which they are oblivious to the outer world’. ‘Closed outward eyes’, Spearing observes, translate to ‘clear inward sight.’24 Sleep is the first step toward the ‘spiritual adventure’ of the dream-vision, even, Chaucer seems to wager, when that vision is secular in its orientation.25 It makes possible those interior journeys because it effects, or, more precisely, gives the illusion of an escape from the body and other material attachments.26 In a parodic echo of Paul’s description of his vision of heaven 22 23 24 25 26

Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, vol. 1, p. 331. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry, p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. On dreams as a form of ‘spiritual adventure’ see ibid., pp. 6–8. In The Fall of Sleep, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy associates sleep with ‘the absolute’,



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– ‘sive in corpore, sive extra corpus nescio’ [‘whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not’] (2 Corinthians 12:3), Chaucer’s narrator in the House of Fame experiences a similarly ambiguous embodiment in sleep: ‘Thoo gan y wexen in a were, / And seyde, “Y wot wel y am here, / But wher in body or in gost / I not, ywys, but God, thou wost”’ (979–82). Following in this tradition, but achieving a more definitive impression of escape, the narrator of Pearl perceives a separation of body and mind in his sleep: ‘Fro spot my spyryt ther sprang in space – / My body on balke ther bod’ (61–2).27 For the Pearl-poet, sleep initiates a visionary experience, but however far the narrator travels in ‘spyryt’, the body lies in wait, anchoring his soul to the full term of this earthly life. Sleep in Book of the Duchess likewise signals Chaucer’s interest in exploring the mind–body problem, which I have argued is synonymous with the problem of writing poetry: that is, the problem of making manifest, or externalizing, a subjective, interior experience. Having finished reading the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, the narrator proposes to make a bargain with Morpheus and Juno so that, in exchange for a feather bed and fine linens, they’d make him sleep just as Alcyone did.28 No sooner has he uttered the promise than he falls asleep suddenly ‘ryght upon [his] book’ (274). We visualize his head pressed to the page, an image that aligns the open book and the sleeping body. This configuration suggests that the book is the agent of his sleep: the book, in a sense, becomes the narrator’s bed, the physical place upon which his body rests in slumber. Falling asleep ‘upon’ the book suggests the soporific effect of its story and, indeed, of the practice of bedtime reading more generally. At the same time, Chaucer’s joining of book and body here also suggests that the book is like the sleeping body: both are material vessels, potentially ‘merely’ that, mere shells or signifiers, but both, in this case, ‘containers’ for story. For though his body sleeps, his mind remains active, traveling not to some place outside the body, but to a place within it: Y fil aslepe, and therwith even Me mette so ynly swete a sweven, So wonderful that never yit Y trowe no man had the wyt To konne wel my sweven rede …

27 28

(275–9, my emphasis)

drawing on the term’s Latin root ‘ab-solutum’, meaning ‘that which is set free’: sleep is ‘detachment from everything, it is that from which every link, every relation, every connection or composition, has been dissolved and excluded. It is that which essentially comes undone, detaches itself and releases itself even from any relation with its own detachment’ (The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell [New York, 2009], p. 15). Pearl, ed. Sarah Stanbury (Kalamazoo, MI, 2001), cited by line number. On the significance of these ‘sleep barters’, which also appear in Machaut’s Fonteinne and Froissart’s Paradis d’amours, see Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Place of the Bedchamber in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, SAC 37 (2015), 133–61 (at p. 137).

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The Riverside Chaucer doesn’t gloss ‘ynly’, but editions that do gloss the term render it as an intensifier, an adverb of quality rather than kind: the narrator’s dream is ‘deeply sweet’ (Phillips and Havely) or ‘thoroughly sweet’ (Lynch).29 But ‘ynly’, in both adverbial and adjectival uses, can indicate not just intensity, entirety, and sincerity, but also interiority, in both physical and spiritual senses, typically equating body to surface and mind or soul to ‘ynly’ depth.30 In the Regement of Princes, for example, Hoccleve speaks of persons who are ‘inly pensif’ and therefore desirous of solitude (85). This use of the term particularly flourishes in religious contexts, as in Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, which urges its pupil to avoid ‘fleischli likynges’, which ‘maken a man wel beestli, and fer from inli savour of the love of God’ (1.72.2109–10).31 ‘Ynly’, in other words, is part of an emergent Middle English vocabulary of interiority, a word that writers used to signal their exploration of psychological concerns: that is, the relationship of body and soul. For Chaucer’s narrator, the ‘ynly’ sweetness of the dream he experiences initially points to the difficulty of interpretation. The lines above concern his would-be readership: ‘Y trowe no man had the wyt / To konne wel my sweven rede’ (278–9). As Rosemary P. McGerr observes, these lines ‘place his vision in the biblical and medieval traditions of the dream vision’ and also ‘challenge the audience to test its reading skills’.32 But if we understand ‘ynly’ to suggest not just intensity but specifically the quality of interiority, the subjective nature of his dream experience, these lines also announce a writerly problem: how can he make us know what he saw in his sleep? How can what was experienced inside be made manifest outside? Chaucer elsewhere frames this same dilemma as a problem of ‘telling’, as in the invocation to Thought that prefaces Book 2 of the House of Fame: O Thought, that wrot al that I mette, And in the tresorye hyt shette Of my brayn, now shal men se Yf any vertu in the be To tellen al my drem aryght. Now kythe thyn engyn and myght!

(523–8, my emphasis)

The poem becomes the result of the poet’s efforts to ‘turn out’ the dream

29 30 31 32

See Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, ed. Phillips and Havely, and Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Kathryn Lynch (New York, 2007). See MED s.v. ‘inli’ (adv.) and (adj). Quoted from Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, ed. Thomas H. Bestul (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), by book, chapter, and line number. Rosemary P. McGerr, Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse (Gainesville, FL, 1998), p. 55.



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‘shette’ in his memory.33 In the next section I turn to Machaut’s Fonteinne to elucidate what is at stake in Chaucer’s treatment of sleep as a means of crossing the boundary between body and mind.

‘Prist la fourme’: The Work of Sleep in Machaut’s Livre de la fonteinne amoreuse Chaucer’s description of the ‘werk’ of sleep finds an echo in one of his chief sources for the Book of the Duchess, Guillaume de Machaut’s Livre de la fonteinne amoreuse. Machaut’s dit tells the story of a clerkly narrator who overhears and transcribes an insomniac lover’s complaint. The next day, he pledges his service to the lover, who takes him to a locus amoenus where the two fall asleep and experience the same dream featuring Venus and the lover’s lady. Here I will be concerned with the first part of the dit, in which the narrator overhears the lover’s account of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone and his consequent hopes that sleep and dreams might prove the solution to his own dilemma. Like Chaucer, Machaut presents sleep as a point of contact between body and mind, a condition in which matter can be converted to spirit, and vice versa. Machaut also, I would argue, somewhat more optimistically than Chaucer, represents sleep as a point of contact between minds, as the co-dreaming of the narrator and lover attests. As R. Barton Palmer observes, Chaucer’s and Machaut’s uses of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone diverge because their aims in writing are essentially distinct: ‘Because Chaucer is writing an elegy of sorts and Machaut a triumphant love story … the two poets make quite different use of the oft-told tale.’34 The same caveat applies to their respective outlooks on the possibility of knowing other minds, but such a comparison must begin by examining their shared treatment of sleep as a trope of metafictional discovery. Machaut’s investment in the power of sleep becomes apparent in the lover’s description of the God of Sleep’s cave.35 The lover describes him as a ‘kind divinity’ [‘li dous dieus’] whose progeny are master shapeshifters (626).36 The god lies in his bed, surrounded by ‘a thousand daughters and sons, / 33

34

35 36

On the relationship between ‘telling’ and ‘tallying’, or ‘giving account’, see MED s.v. ‘tellen’ (v.), especially defs 1–2, which denote speech and storytelling, and def. 17, which denotes counting. I discuss this passage in relation to memory and storytelling in ‘Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, SAC 37 (2015), 101–32 (at pp. 120–1). Palmer, ‘Rereading Guillaume de Machaut’s Vision of Love: Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess as Bricolage’, in Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading, ed. David Galef (Detroit, MI, 1998), pp. 169–95 (at p. 179). As in Ovid, in the Fonteinne, Morpheus is only one of the God of Sleep’s thousand offspring. All citations of Livre de la fonteinne amoreuse are from Guillaume de Machaut, The Fountain of Love (La Fonteinne Amoureuse) and Two Other Love Vision Poems, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1993). Line numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.

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Many fantasies, dreams of different kinds, / Of good, of evil, of joy, and of sorrow’ [‘mil filles et mil fieus, / Trop vanitez et songes tieus et quieus, / De bien, de mal, de joies, et de dieus’] (627–9). Following Ovid, Machaut describes their power to transform themselves, highlighting their remarkable physical and linguistic freedom:37 The thousand sons who were by his side, And the daughters too, changed shape As they wished, for they took the forms Of people So that, in sleep, through dreams, they appeared In different guises … They can speak the language and talk Of every land. Of water, of fire, of every accident, Of iron, of wood they take the form. No other duty is theirs, no other care. They go everywhere. (635–40, 645–50) [Les mille fieus qui entour lui estoient, Et les filles aussi, se transmuoient, A leur voloir, car les fourmes prenoient Des creatures, Si qu’en dormant par songes se moustroient Diversement … De tous païe langages et murmures Parler savoient; D’iaue, de feu, de toutes aventures, De fer, de fust prenoient les figures. Autre mestier n’avoient, n’autres cures. Par tout aloient.]

This boundless capacity for permutation is for Machaut the ‘mestier’, or work, of sleep (649). Indeed, the Old French ‘mestier’ is the root of the Middle English ‘mister’, which describes an occupation, skill, or craft, and, by extension, a guild of craftsmen.38 Like Chaucer’s description of Morpheus and his heir, who ‘slep and dide noon other werk’ (169), Machaut also classifies sleep as a legitimate craft – the God of Sleep and his progeny don’t have any ‘autre’, or ‘other’, kind of work, no other ‘cures’ or duties to occupy them. In comparison with Chaucer’s description of the competitive slumber of Morpheus and the denizens of his cave, Machaut’s description gives the ‘work’ of sleep a rather more active cast. Though he does specify that they do these things ‘en dormant par songes’ [‘in sleep, through dreams’] (639), 37 38

Compare Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.573–649. MED s.v. ‘mister’ (n). See especially defs 2a–b.



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Machaut paints a lively portrait of the God of Sleep and his kin who keep busy by changing shape, picking up languages, and traveling ‘par tout’. The God of Sleep’s apparently boundless capacity for transformation inspires Machaut’s lover to use sleep to establish a line of communication with his beloved, who, heretofore, remains ignorant of his feelings for her. The comparison with Chaucer’s representation of the transformative potential of sleep is particularly striking here. Chaucer’s narrators read, sleep, and find their reading transmuted into the mental space of their dreams, written on walls, painted in glass, embodied as speaking figures.39 This is an ekphrastic process: when we read, we form pictures in our minds, assembling them together as we decipher the code of words on pages.40 In this way a material thing becomes a virtual thing – a word on the page becomes an image in the mind. Similarly, Chaucer’s reading-then-sleeping narrators translate, or ‘carry over’, the materiality of the pages encountered in the waking world to the dream worlds into which they ‘wake’ in their visions. Machaut’s concern with sleep also focuses attention on the strange entanglement of body and mind in sleep, of material form and immaterial idea. For Machaut, too, sleep is the open conduit between these realms. The ‘work’ of sleep is to provide a channel between them. Interestingly, in the speech of the lover, Machaut suggests movement in the opposite direction from Chaucer’s ekphrastic process, or at least a continuation of it: instead of carrying matter into mind, Machaut imagines how mental images might move back out into the ‘real world’. Indeed, his lover imagines that he might exploit this function of sleep in order to woo his beloved. In Book of the Duchess, as we have seen, sleeping gives access to knowledge. Fearing the worst, but unable to confirm Ceyx’s death, Alcyone prays to Juno: ‘Send me grace to slepe and mete / In my slep some certeyn sweven / Wherthourgh that I may knowen even / Whether my lord be quyk or ded’ (118–21). Likewise, in Machaut’s Fonteinne, sleep is for finding things out. Indeed, while Book of the Duchess as a whole largely undercuts the ‘certainty’ that Alcyone hopes sleep will bring, Machaut’s poem is more firmly invested in heralding the clarifying power of sleep. In sleep, dreams serve as a lover’s go-between, a means of indirect communication between minds. When the poem begins, an insomniac narrator overhears a lover who wants to compose a complaint and believes he’ll live more happily thereafter because his lady will know how he feels (Fonteinne 219–20). Yet propriety bars him from sending his lady such a message. He must seek another way to find out whether his love has any chance to succeed: ‘If I wish to learn the end that I can achieve / With this love’ [‘Se savoir vueil a quel fin puis venir / De ceste 39

40

See Piero Boitani, ‘Old Books Brought to Life in Dreams: The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls’, in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 58–77. On reading and ekphrasis, see Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ, 1999).

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amour’] (540–1). Sleeping and dreaming thus become metaphors for poetic production even as Machaut represents the process as an alternative to written communication. The lover’s idea for an alternative means of communication comes from the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. Like Chaucer’s narrator, the lover identifies with Alcyone’s plight: like him, Alcyone suffers from insomnia because she yearns for knowledge of another, though interestingly, it isn’t knowledge of Ceyx’s mind that she seeks (i.e., does he love her?) but some explanation for his disappearance and presumed death. She searches the sea for him seeking ‘to discover the truth’ [‘savoir le voir’] (548), to know ‘where and why and when / He had died’ [‘ou, et pourquoy, et quant / Il fu peris’] (563–4).41 Yet though her grief and desperation impede the natural course of sleep, paradoxically, it is only through sleep that Alcyone might gain the knowledge that she seeks. By Juno’s intercession, the God of Sleep [‘Dieus de sommeil’] puts Alcyone to sleep and summons Morpheus, one of the god’s many sons: Then Morpheus Assumed the form of a naked Ceyx, … He came into Alcyone’s room, Discolored, pale, woebegone, And he manifested to her all the mischance That had come upon him. [Lors Morpheüs Prist la fourme que Ceïs avoit nus … Dedens la chambre Alchioine est venus, Descolourez, pales, et esperdus, Et le peril ou il est encheüs Tout li revelle.]

(657–8, 663–6)

Morpheus-as-Ceyx asks Alcyone to behold him, to remember him, to see his various physical aspects as a ‘true token of [his] death’ [‘vraie enseingne’] (679). The dream, we are told, gives her clear, certain knowledge of his demise [‘clerement’, ‘certeinnement’] (683–4). But his body is not truly present; what she beholds is a simulacrum with no physical correlative in the waking world. Indeed, her vision of him can only last so long as she sleeps: ‘She awoke in order to embrace him, / But he, with no power to linger longer, / Disappeared’ [‘Celle s’esveille afin qu’elle le teingne, / Mais cils, qui n’a pouoir que plus remaingne, / S’esvanuist’] (680–2). Machaut’s Alcyone continues to grieve after waking and soon dies, but Juno turns Alcyone and

41

Chaucer’s Alcyone similarly yearns not for knowledge of Ceyx’s mind but of his physical whereabouts, as she implores Juno: ‘[Y]eve me grace my lord to se / Soone or wite wher-so he be, / Or how he fareth, or in what wise’ (111–13). Unlike Machaut’s Alcyone, she fears but does not assume he is dead.



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Ceyx into kingfishers, in keeping with the Ovidian transformation that Chaucer’s account famously lacks. At this point in Book of the Duchess, having finished reading the story, Chaucer’s narrator expresses a desire to be like Alcyone, promising Morpheus a feather bed and other fineries ‘[y]f he kan make me slepe sone, / As did the goddesse quene Alcione’ (263–4). But in the Fonteinne, while Machaut’s lover initially observes his similarities to the insomniac, knowledge-seeking Alcyone he finds inspiration not in her part of the story, but in Ceyx’s. As he formulates his hope that Morpheus might ‘perform his office’ [‘face son appareil’] (709), it becomes clear that he doesn’t wish for sleep or a prophetic dream that would answer his desire to know his lady’s heart, but rather that he himself might be transported, as it were, into his lady’s sleep, into her dreaming mind, just as Ceyx came to Alcyone. He wants Morpheus to go to his beloved ‘[i]n my shape’ [‘[e]n ma fourme’], not just once, but ‘[f]ive times or six’ [‘[v]. fois ou .vi.’] (716), and so to ‘tell her’ [‘li dit’] how he suffers. His hope, in short, is that Morpheus will speak for him, give ‘body’, as it were, to his feelings and desires. But Machaut’s lover’s fantasy doesn’t end there. He imagines a chain of propitious events that would follow on his lady’s waking from her dream. Seeing Morpheus’s representation of him in his suffering, he expects, will inspire her pity, and her pity, he further expects, will open the door to ‘Sweet Thought’ [‘Dous Penser’] (727). Then ‘Sweet Thought’ – yet another go-­between – will ‘tell her’ [‘li dira’] (729), again, now in waking hours, how he suffers, and then she will ‘learn’ [‘porra savoir’] (731) the truth of his love, presumably by continuing to reflect on her dream. Indeed, Machaut conceptualizes ‘Sweet Thought’ as another kind of dreaming, a sort of daytime residue of the same thoughts that, by Morpheus’s intercession, occupied the lady’s sleeping mind at night. Of course, none of this comes to pass in the Fonteinne, though the lover does eventually meet with his lady and secure the promise of her love in a dream that he shares with the narrator. This is a lover’s fantasy, a stratagem devised in desperation to communicate across physical, social, and mental barriers. Machaut’s treatment of the trope of sleep might be characterized as somewhat breezy in comparison to Chaucer’s more insistent materiality. His lover’s plans resemble the busy permutations of the God of Sleep’s realm: his sons and daughters come and go; death results in Ovidian transformations and new life in a different form; lovers smuggle themselves into women’s minds as they sleep; and a poet and his patron can share the same dream. Although like Chaucer he uses the trope of sleep to highlight the mind–body problem, Machaut is in general less observant of, or, we might say, more sanguine about the possibilities for exploiting the boundary between mental and physical phenomena. Chaucer’s revivification of Ceyx, by contrast, begins with a body, a striking if rather improbable gambit: how does Morpheus get Ceyx’s actual

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body into the sleeping Alcyone’s mind? Why does Morpheus need a body at all? We might say that Chaucer is simply untroubled by these questions of mind and body, that to ask them overliteralizes Chaucer’s own literalization of the process. Nevertheless, Morpheus’s puppeteering of Ceyx’s corpse corresponds to the insistent materialism evinced by Chaucer’s refusal of the Ovidian transformation at the end of Ceyx and Alcyone’s story. Machaut offers us something of the reverse process when it comes to the lover’s fantasy of entering his lady’s thoughts in sleep. He hopes to start with abstraction and produce a real body. Indeed, the turn to personification allegory in the invocation of ‘Sweet Thought’ formally mirrors how the lover imagines that the ‘detour’ of sleep might bring abstraction to embodiment. ‘Sweet Thought’ is a way of thinking thought, of giving body to an idea, a name to an invisible activity. Moreover, his insistence that Morpheus visit his lady ‘five or six times’ suggests the importance of repetition in the process. He imagines her waking and thinking repeatedly about what she saw in her dream until the dream assumes its own kind of reality: ‘An oft-repeated daydream could hardly be a fantasy, / But rather it must be true / Since it doesn’t alter or change’ [‘Songier souvent ne doit mie estre fable, / Einsois chose doit estre veritable / Quant elle n’est muant ne variable’] (783–5). Machaut’s vision of sleeping and dreaming, at least as it is represented in his naïve lover’s plan, is a particularly optimistic one.42 The lover imagines himself able to instrumentalize sleep as a channel of communication, much as Chaucer’s narrator, at the beginning of the Book of the Duchess, imagines a transaction between himself and the gods who have power over sleep. But while the dream that ensues in Book of the Duchess is riven through with confused meanings and miscommunications, in the Fonteinne Machaut’s lover associates dreams with certainty and clarity, a prized realm of revelation accessible ‘en dormant’. He imagines that his lady will see that the ‘ill she causes’ him ‘is a fact’ [‘de fait’] if Morpheus ‘imitates [him] correctly’ [‘Se Morpheus a droit me contrefait’] (787–8). His conditional ‘if’ [‘[s]e’] – admitting that Morpheus might do a poor impersonation of him – cleverly pairs ‘fact’ and ‘fake’ in the rhyme scheme, but nevertheless evinces a hopefulness that Morpheus will do his work skillfully and sincerely (‘a droit’). The lover’s entreaties suggest those of a poet bidding a scribe to copy his exemplar faithfully and well: he is at once hopeful about making a successful communication yet mindful of the possibility of error. The lover wants to be understood fully and correctly and believes Morpheus has the power to make his sufferings ‘as clear to my beloved as the bright day, / With no obscurity’ [‘a m’amour clere com li biaus jours, / Sans parabole’] (817–18). Ironically, given that he has already dismissed the possibility of writing her a letter on

42

For the view that Machaut ‘gently but unmistakably ridicules’ the lover’s ‘naïveté and inexperience’, see Palmer, ‘Rereading’, p. 178.



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the grounds that she would find such a direct revelation unseemly, he now hopes that a confession of his love that is displaced through the filters of sleep and dream might be simultaneously mediated and immediate, its meaning not too bald, and yet utterly bare, admitting none of the mystery and literary ornament implied by the term ‘parabole’ (818). What this comparison allows us to see are the ways that both Chaucer and Machaut imagine sleep as a point of contact between body and mind that enables transmutations of matter and spirit, the real and the virtual. Considered in these terms, sleep is rather like the ‘wyndowe’ of the wicker house where lies and truths meet, clasp hands, and become forever entangled in the House of Fame (2091). So, too, through the ‘portal’ of sleep, body and mind are bound as we ‘fall’ into sleep and as we wake from it, bearing traces of our dreams into daylight.

‘Hyt nas no countrefeted thyng’: Sleep and Death In Book of the Duchess the project of memorializing and to some extent reanimating the dead Blanche is Chaucer’s answer to Machaut’s lover’s hope that dreams of him might come to life and influence his lady’s thoughts during the day. Recalling his first encounter with his ‘lost’ Lady White, the Black Knight remarks that her benevolent ‘lokyng’ was ‘no countrefeted thyng’, but utterly free of artifice (869–70). In this description, the Black Knight’s memory of his Lady White is eerily counterposed to Morpheus’s reanimation of Ceyx.43 We have seen that Chaucer and Machaut take different approaches to the issue of raising Ceyx from the dead. Whereas for Machaut, who follows Ovid, Morpheus’s work is imitative, Chaucer’s Morpheus is insistently, almost ludicrously literal. Machaut’s Morpheus ‘prist la fourme’ (658), or ‘took the shape’ of Ceyx. He makes manifest – in a dream, where such things are possible – a recognizable simulacrum of the dead person. But Chaucer insists that Morpheus takes up the actual body of Ceyx and, apparently, ‘creeps into’ it, making dead matter breathe again. As Juno instructs, he must ‘do the body speke ryght soo, / Ryght as hyt was woned to doo / The whiles that hit was alyve’ (149–51). If the body speaks ‘[r]yght as’ Ceyx did when he was alive, is this then a counterfeit? Is the Black Knight’s memory of the now dead Lady White’s merciful gaze more authentic? Kiser argues that ‘Morpheus’s success in literally raising the dead is finally inadequate fakery when compared to Chaucer’s oblique, gentle, and painstakingly constructed resurrection of Blanche’.44 But what I have attempted to show in this essay is that neither Chaucer’s grossly mechanical presenta-

43 44

For a consideration of the problematics of this, see Knox’s essay in this volume. Kiser, ‘Sleep’, p. 12.

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tion of Morpheus’s work – ventriloquizing the body itself – nor Machaut’s looser Ovidian description – the euphemistic ‘prist la fourme’ (658) – really explains how Morpheus does his work, and, by extension, how words become images in the mind, or how either words or images can represent the totality of a living person, or one who has died. That is, Chaucer’s literalization not only unmasks the limitations of Morpheus’s work, as Kiser suggests, but of his own work, too: neither Machaut’s nor Chaucer’s Morpheus can truly bring Ceyx back to life, for neither ‘Ceyx’ is the man that Alcyone lost. Similarly, neither the Black Knight’s nor Chaucer’s own efforts to bring Blanche back from the dead can succeed fully. Or, rather, they succeed precisely in their failure to reconstruct and reanimate a tangible image of Blanche. The Black Knight’s speech is all memory, all mind, precisely the opposite of Morpheus’s resurrected Ceyx, who is Ceyx in body only. The problem of Ceyx’s resurrection as it relates to the elegiac project of the Book of the Duchess is finally a problem of representation as well as a problem of ontology, both of which the trope of sleep brings to the fore by highlighting the mutual implication of body and mind in the human person. Machaut’s lover didn’t want to write his lady a letter, fearing that such means would be too direct, too much body; instead, he hopes to approach her more obliquely in a dream, which, like the reading process, transmutes another person’s thoughts and words into the dreamer’s or the reader’s mind so that they become, in a sense, nativized, already a part of her own mind. This approach, the lover surmises, offers a safer and more respectful means of revelation. Chaucer’s strategy for memorializing Blanche in Book of the Duchess finally takes a similar approach to that of Machaut’s lover. J. Stephen Russell summarizes the problem well: ‘Faced with [the] impossible task’ of memorializing his grieving patron’s late wife, ‘Chaucer hit upon a novel and daring strategy: to write not an expression of sympathy but a demonstration of the hopelessness of such an expression.’45 Blanche appears in the Black Knight’s memories as a collection of parts elaborated in a lengthy blazon, but even as the Black Knight recalls their courtship in great detail, Chaucer refrains from counterfeiting her by assembling these details into a living, coherent portrait of Blanche. She does not appear in the text in her own right, a troubling absence with respect to gender politics. As Elaine Tuttle Hansen observes, Chaucer ‘idealizes the historical Blanche out of existence’.46 But the work of sleep, by calling attention to the possibilities as well as the limitations of inherently subjective experiences – reading, remembering, dreaming, loving, grieving – suggests why Chaucer declined to give Blanche a voice and thus to counterfeit her. In the Book of the Duchess, as in the House of Fame, the interiorizing work

45 46

Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Columbus, OH, 1988), p. 144. Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, CA, 1992), p. 59.



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of sleep allows Chaucer to explore the process of dreaming and writing as memorial arts. Here the turn inward effected by sleep is not only an encounter with memory but an encounter with grief, too. As the narrator clumsily probes the Black Knight’s grief in Book of the Duchess, Chaucer attempts to give readers a glimpse of Lady White. But we are always at several removes from her, and must remain so. To know Blanche is akin to experiencing another person’s dream, a practical impossibility. Even those who knew Blanche in life (as Chaucer might have done) can only ever approximate another person’s subjective experience of that relationship, much less the grief of a bereaved husband. The question, finally, for Chaucer isn’t whether poetry can resurrect the dead but whether it can make us know another person’s grief. Chaucer’s narrator, as we have seen, responds sympathetically to Alcyone’s plight – for a day at least. Is this the best that poetry can hope to achieve? Or, to look at it from another direction, isn’t that quite an achievement?

4 Discovering Woe: The Translation of Affect in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Spenser’s Daphnaïda MARION WELLS

Prologue: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Transformation of Grief When Ovid’s Alcyone dreams of her dead husband, Ceyx (who is in fact Morpheus in disguise, sent by Juno to relieve the queen’s anguished uncertainty about his fate at sea), she awakens in distress, roused by the sound of her own voice (‘uoce sua … turbata’, Met. 11.677).1 Interestingly, Alcyone’s voice straddles both dream and reality; she really does speak, but she is speaking to someone, in her dream, who isn’t ‘really’ there. Her voice attempts a poignant translation – from dream to waking – that it cannot complete. The episode beautifully illustrates the dream’s work as a kind of transitional space for Alcyone, representing her husband, one last time, in the act of telling her that he isn’t there. Once shaken out of sleep into reality, Alcyone begins the process of accommodating her husband’s death. But in this bereft waking world her own voice now rapidly ceases to be able to articulate her emotions, and we are told that wailing took the place of words as she absorbs her loss (‘uerboque interuenit omni / plangor’, 11.708–9). The dream seems to pave the way for what happens next: a sighting of the dead body itself, which washes ashore in front of her and elicits an immediate deictic recognition: ‘ille est!’ (11.725). But this direct confrontation with the body of Ceyx – the real body, it appears, not the phantom shape conjured by Morpheus – precipitates a final cutting off of her ability to speak, and she metamorphoses into a bird characterized precisely by its plangent, though of course speechless, cries (11.734–5). Because the appearance of the body of Ceyx is not part of Morpheus’s plan, it seems to result at least in part from 1

Quotations of Ovid are from Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford, 2004), by book and line number.

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the psychological process set in motion by the dream and partially articulated in Alcyone’s grief-stricken cries. The appearance of the body marks a forward movement in her understanding of her husband’s death. But the metamorphosis suggests that the process of accommodation – what Freud will call the work of mourning – stalls precisely at the vision of the corpse. As the bird Alcyone becomes a figure for an inarticulate sorrow that will never develop into a more psychologically integrated form. Her affective state – sorrow – has literally taken over her body.

Translations of Affect in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess I have retold this little story as prologue to my argument, because my focus in this essay will be on Chaucer’s use of the story as a prologue to his own exploration of the relationship between inarticulate bodily feeling and linguistic expressions of grief. In the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s narrator seems to be in a frozen emotional state similar to Alcyone’s at the beginning of the poem: I take no kepe Of noothinge – how hyt cometh or gooth, Ne me nys nothynge leve nor looth. Al is ylyche goode to me, Joy or sorowe, wherso hyt be; For I have felynge in nothynge, But as yt were a mased thynge, Alway in poynt to falle adoun.

(BD 6–13)2

The self-emptying negativity of this passage hardly needs to be pointed out; the dominant word here is ‘nothing’, repeated three times. The narrator himself is a ‘mased thynge’, a barely human ‘thing’ whose lack of vitality arises from his inability to feel – ‘I have felynge in nothynge.’ The primary symptom of his mysterious ‘sickness’, aside from insomnia, is a blank, deadly, and indeed death-like apathy.3 I will suggest in this essay that the narrator’s dream functions, like Alcyone’s, as a transitional space in which certain unaccommodated losses can find voice, and in which vitality will emerge as though from a kind of death. The narrator’s encounter with the Black Knight who clearly functions as an alter ego within his dream dramatizes a movement from this inarticulate apathy (‘felynge in nothynge’) to what the poem names as a complaint; furthermore, the discovery of the loss at the source 2 3

Chaucer’s works cited from Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, ed. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely (London, 1997). It is reasonable to see hints of the illness of acedia here, given the narrator’s listlessness and apathy. See my discussion of the disorder’s connection to melancholy below, p. 92.



The Translation of Affect in Chaucer and Spenser  73

of the Black Knight’s complaint (‘Is that youre loss?’) is the catalyst for an externalization of inward sorrow hitherto inscribed only within the mind.4 If Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone is prologue to both Chaucer’s story and my account of it, the epilogue is Spenser’s less well known and certainly less critically appreciated transformation of these sources in his own poem about grief, Daphnaïda. While Chaucer’s poem promotes a translation of affect within its project of creatively translating Ovid and Machaut (primarily), however, Spenser’s Daphnaïda rejects the curative potential of dream narrative, and in doing so tips irrevocably into what that poem quite decisively represents as a potentially suicidal despair. Spenser’s Alcyon, a male version of Ovid’s Alcyone, remains in the grip of a powerfully intransigent emotion, despite having articulated his narrative of loss. Part of our task here will be to consider the implications of Spenser’s decision to deny Alcyon the infusion of vitality enjoyed by the narrator and arguably by the Man in Black himself in the earlier poem. Taking my cue from some of the terms and inquiries emerging from both practitioners and critics of affect theory, I will suggest that what is as stake here is a translation of speechless and unconscious feeling – which we will call affect – into the publicly recognizable emotion language of woe, which is to say, elegy. This involves a complex negotiation between the drives and energies of the ‘felyng’ body and the symbolic articulations of the conscious speaker, a negotiation that the fluid boundaries of the dream space help to facilitate. That translation itself is at issue is not coincidental; Chaucer translates – and transforms – his Ovidian and French sources within the liminal space of the dream, in which the hidden sources of the narrator’s ‘sickness’ make themselves felt by way of the dream’s swerves from its French and Latin original forebears. In his account of emotion language, to which I am indebted for my thinking about the work of emotion language in literature, William Reddy also emphasizes the role of translation in the production of emotional utterances, or ‘emotives’, commenting memorably: ‘[emotion] utterances are not based on language alone; they are translations into that language of a small part of the flow of coded messages that an awake body generates’.5 The translation work of such utterances are, as Reddy emphasizes, built into a dialogic setting – the translation is there for the purpose of communication, and presumes an audience, even if that audience is, paradoxically, the utterer herself.6 With this framework in mind, we will be paying close attention to

4

5 6

Steven Kruger (among many others) sees the Black Knight as an alter ego for the narrator: ‘Medical and Moral Authority in the Late Medieval Dream’, in Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford, 1999), pp. 51–83 (at p. 73 and n. 60). William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), p. 110. Reddy comments that ‘the problem of translation has … generally … been regarded as an

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the way Chaucer constructs the ‘awake body’ in his poem, and how he sets up the relationship between that body and emotional utterance. Since the terms I am using and the differences between them are far from stable within affect theory, I will begin by clarifying my use of them in this essay. One strain of affect theory, articulated most influentially by Brian Massumi, finds it useful to separate the terms affect and emotion entirely.7 In this view, affect is in essence an autonomous set of bodily energies that are sub-personal and sublinguistic. In general, affect theory calls for a renewed focus on bodily energies and forces that sometimes precipitate into emotions but often operate invisibly behind the scenes. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg offer the following as a rough working definition of affect: Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement.8

For Massumi, affect is experienced primarily as intensity. As such, it drives us toward more defined feelings and objects by a kind of compulsion that radically disrupts any sense of autonomous and sovereign self.9 By contrast, emotion is a ‘qualified intensity’ that has entered the matrix of language and reason: ‘an emotion is a subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’.10 The great payoff of Massumi’s and others’ work on affect is to have drawn attention to the deficits of the so-called judgmentalist view of emotion: namely, the idea that emotion is always at some level a judgement of a situation, involving perception, reason, and an assessment of the ‘fit’ of the emotion to the situation according to certain social norms.11 Like several other recent critics working within the field of affect theory, I find it useful to make a broad distinction between affect and emotion, but not an absolute one. As Sianne Ngai puts it, it is useful to assume that ‘affects are less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less “sociolinguistically fixed”, but by no means code-free or meaningless’.12 It is, as Ngai argues, precisely in tracing the

7 8 9 10 11 12

issue that comes up between persons. It has not been widely recognized that translation must necessarily come up within the individual as well’ (Navigation of Feeling, p. 110). Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique 31 (1995), 83–109. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC, 2010), pp. 1–2. Donovan Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC, 2015), p. 65. Massumi, ‘Autonomy’, p. 88. See Talia Morag, Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason (London, 2016), especially pp. 57–72. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA, 2004), p. 27.



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tension between the less formed and structured affects and the more readily visible and fully articulated emotions, as well as the often difficult transition between these poles, that we can diagnose key moments of transformation or blockage.13 Linda Zerilli has argued similarly that affects should not be seen as entirely segregated from the rational systems of thought that help to produce fully formed emotions, nor should they be regarded as non-conceptual, but instead correlated with the ‘conceptual dimensions of embodied experience’.14 It is precisely at the level of these ‘unconscious ordinary modes of skilled embodied comportment’ that Zerilli suggests that it is possible to produce change in the way that ‘social norms are taken up and reproduced’.15 Although Zerilli does not use Reddy’s term ‘emotive’ in her work, it is helpful to think of the emotive as an utterance that attempts to marshal partially conceptualized affective material into symbolic form. This effort of ‘translation’ is challenging and prone to failure because normative emotional conventions have extensive and often disciplinary force.16 As we have seen, Chaucer’s narrator diagnoses his own condition at the beginning of the poem as one of apathy and depletion of self. If affect broadly understood amounts to the ‘capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness’, the narrator’s absence of responsiveness indicates an internal blockage so profound that it empties him of life.17 He has ‘felynge in nothynge’, and his ‘hevynesse’ has ‘slain [his] spirite of quyknesse’ (BD 25–6). This is, indeed, a kind of living death. On the basis of the symptoms he does enumerate, it is tempting to assume that this sickness fits the basic paradigm of lovesickness, or amor hereos as it was often called: strange imaginations (‘sorwful ymagynacioun’, 14) that obsessively preoccupy; insomnia (‘defaulte of slepe’, 25); and a mysterious lack of clarity about what the source or cause of the illness is: ‘Myselven can not tel why / The sothe’ (34–5).18 The fact that he does refer to his illness as ‘thys melancolye’ (23) may also indicate an erotic basis to his sickness, since melancholy was often the end result of untreated lovesickness.19 The link with melancholy also accentuates the occluded nature of

13 14 15 16 17 18

19

Ibid., p. 27. Zerilli, ‘The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment’, New Literary History 46/2 (2015), 261–86 (at p. 281). Ibid., p. 264. See Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities (Ithaca, NY, 2006), pp. 18–19. Schaefer, Religious Affects, p. 101. For a full discussion of the symptoms and treatments of medieval lovesickness, see Mary Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA, 1990). Constantine’s Viaticum invokes Galen to make the connection between lovesickness and melancholy: ‘if erotic lovers are not helped so that their thought is lifted and their spirit lightened, they inevitably fall into a melancholic disease’ (Constantine, Viaticum 1.20.27– 30). Text and translation in Wack, Lovesickness, pp. 188–9.

76  Marion Wells

the illness, since melancholy was associated throughout the medical tradition with secrecy and mystery, as a representative remark by André Du Laurens confirms: We observe such strange imaginations in some melancholike men, as cannot be referred either to the complexion of the bodie, or to their condition of life: the cause thereof remaineth unknown, it seemeth to be some secret mysterie.20

In spite of the similarities between the narrator’s symptomatology and lovesickness or love melancholy, however, Chaucer seems quite deliberately not to specify love as a source of the illness. Chaucer’s model for the opening sequence, to which he otherwise quite closely hews, Froissart’s Paradys D’Amours, does specify love as the initiating cause of the speaker’s illness.21 It is precisely the initial obscurity of the suffering that interests me most for the purposes of this essay: the notion that the cause of the illness is mysterious not only to those around the sufferer but, perhaps in the narrator’s case, to the sufferer himself. To draw on Zerilli’s argument, it might be useful to think of such a mystery in terms of an affective bodily experience that either exhausts or is mismatched with the leading emotion vocabulary available to the sufferer, and which expresses itself as both a kind of aporia and physical torpor. From a contemporary psychoanalytic point of view the mystery is partly attributable to the particular psychic structure of melancholia, which arises from the failure of a beloved object to facilitate the introjection of desires.22 These unmediated desires remain unnamed and unknown and cannot, therefore, be fully integrated into conscious awareness. For Judith Butler, who identifies melancholia with the development of a gendered identity in particular, melancholia arises through a mechanism by means of ‘prohibitions which demand the loss of certain sexual attachments, and demand as well that these not be avowed, and not be grieved’.23 This preemptive erasure of homosexual attachments produces, Butler argues, ‘a domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss’.24 This focus on melancholia is not confined to the narrator; as several critics have noted, melancholia is what ties together the narrator and his two

20 21 22 23 24

Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of Sight: Of Melancholike Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age (London, 1599), p. 118. Kruger, ‘Medical and Moral Authority’, p. 77, compares Chaucer’s text to the opening of Froissart’s Paradys d’Amours. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, IL, 1994), p. 78. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA, 1997), p. 135. Ibid., p. 135.



The Translation of Affect in Chaucer and Spenser  77

alter egos, Alcyone and the Man in Black, to create what one critic calls ‘a triple reiteration of melancholia’.25 Interestingly, Steven Kruger’s analysis of Chaucer’s poem suggests that the arguably ‘queer’ (in the sense of ‘unnatural’, or in Chaucer’s terms, ‘agaynes kynde’ [BD 16]) desire of the ambiguously gendered narrator undergoes a form of ‘correction’ and normalization through the encounter with the stories of Alcyone and then the Black Knight. Taking our cue from Butler’s account of the production of gender, however, we might instead see the vagueness and ambiguity of the narrator’s body and desire as symptomatic of their imbrication in a socializing narrative that has already left behind a melancholic, unspoken residue – the unknown ‘hert’ of the narrator’s sickness. The encounter with the two texts – Ovidian and dream-text – might undertake not primarily to regulate soma and psyche, as Kruger suggests, but to provide a glimpse into what precedes or exceeds the regulation of emotional utterance. This liminal interlude perhaps provides an opening for the awakening of buried affective experience that lies outside the parameters of the rather narrow ‘overlearned habits’ of courtly love.26 Indeed, the fact that the dreamer’s hunt for the ‘hert’ ends with the discovery of the Black Knight, with whom he engages in an intimate and erotically tinged conversation, suggests, as several critics have argued, that the dream opens up rather than closes down a homoerotic or queer space.27 The main signal of specifically prohibited or ‘queer’ desire on the part of the narrator in Kruger’s account is the reference to his illness as ‘agaynes kynde’; as Kruger points out, this phrase seems to translate the Latin phrase ‘contra naturam’, which occurred in Christian writings about ‘unnatural’ sexuality.28 The phrase is also commonplace in philosophical and medical texts about emotion and passion in general. In his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero defines pathos as ‘aversa a recta ratione contra naturam animi commotio’ [an agitation of the soul alien from right reason and contrary to nature] (emphasis added), and it is a phrase that the Stoic philosopher Seneca frequently uses, especially in his Letters to Lucilius.29 In the medieval and early modern medical tradition, emotions themselves were regarded as one of the six so-called non-natural elements. This Galenic formulation grouped together climate, exercise, food and drink, sleep, sex, and the passions of the mind. These were regarded as neither positive nor negative in themselves, but rather as elements that could be conducive either to health or sickness depending on how they were managed.30 Interacting with the seven natural

25 26 27 28 29 30

Kruger, ‘Medical and Moral Authority’, p. 65. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, pp. 18–19. See in particular Susan Schibanoff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio (Toronto, 2006), pp. 65–100. Kruger, ‘Medical and Moral Authority’, p. 77. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London, 1927), 4.6. Plinio Prioreschi, Medieval Medicine (Omaha, NE, 2003), p. 601.

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elements, which included humors, spirits, and elements, these non-naturals required careful regulation.31 If improperly regulated, they could become contra-natural, and it is in this slippage between non-natural and contra-­ natural that Chaucer’s reference to his narrator’s melancholy seems to lie. The text thus seems to invite a broadly queer reading of ‘commotio animi’ that challenges normative notions of the ‘natural’ and ‘healthful’, perhaps along the lines of the definition of queer offered by Eve Sedgwick as ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.32 Sianne Ngai usefully suggests that affects that have not emerged into fully fledged emotions may nonetheless serve as useful diagnostic tools. Unlike core emotions that are classically associated with action, such as anger, weakly formulated feelings or affects may allow us ‘to diagnose situations … marked by blocked or thwarted action in particular’.33 The narrator’s situation is certainly indicative of thwarted agency: he has become a ‘mased thynge’ incapable of any feeling or motion. And in attempting to unravel the internal problems narratively, the narrator hits some kind of obstacle: For there is phisycien but one That may me heale. But that is done: Passe we over untyl efte; That wyl not be mote nede be lefte.

(39–42)

The gesture of leaving something aside, of covering something over (‘passe we over untyl efte’) indicates the presence of something pressing that remains unsaid. Chaucer uses the rhetorical trope of occupatio here and elsewhere in this text precisely to indicate a gap in psychic or emotional accounting: something is missing that nonetheless exerts an organizing pressure on what is there. In the space of what is unsaid or unsayable, the narrator reaches for a book – a ‘romaunce’ – which then naturally reads as a kind of substitute for what has been passed over in the narrative.34 As Glending Olson has shown, one of the medieval therapies for treating or manipulating the ‘affections of the mind’ for purposes of restoring health was a technique called confabulation. The work of ‘confabulatio’ (through the figure of the confabulator) 31

32 33 34

Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Give Sorrow Words’, in Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006), p. 144. Eve Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC, 1993), p. 8. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 27. For the meaning of ‘romaunce’ as indicating a work in French, see MED s.v. ‘romaunce’ (n.), defs 2 and 3. A. J. Minnis also argues that by ‘Chaucer’s time the word “romaunce” usually referred either to the French language or to a literary work of a particular kind written in the vernacular … not in Latin’. See ‘A Note on Chaucer and the Ovide moralisé’, Medium Ævum 48/2 (1979), 254–7.



The Translation of Affect in Chaucer and Spenser  79

became part of a hygienic regimen in which storytelling, singing, conversation, and discursive therapies in general were used as a means to counter and rebalance disruptive emotion and thus to restore or improve health.35 The reciprocity built into the concept of confabulation is also a hallmark of the emotive, which is constitutively relational in nature, as Reddy has shown.36 When the narrator reaches for this ‘romaunce’, then, it seems as though Ovid becomes the confabulator whose text starts to engage with the missing piece of the narrator’s story of illness precisely by drawing him into an emotional identification with Alcyone: I that made this boke Had such pittee and suche rowthe To rede hir sorwe that, by my trowthe, I ferde the worse al the morwe Aftir, to thenken on hir sorwe.

(96–100)

Unlike its Ovidian original, the dream-text in Chaucer’s poem is explicitly understood as a means to knowledge (‘Send me grace to slepe and mete / In my slepe some certeyn sweven’, 118–19). The ‘ded slepe’ that overtakes Alcyone after she utters this prayer for knowledge about what has befallen Ceyx seems to connect Alcyone’s sleep – her own mind, therefore – with the cave of sleep itself, whose ‘dedely slepynge soun’ (162) also looks forward to the Man in Black’s ‘dedely sorwful soune’ (462). There is a sense in which this dream comes from a place that both is and is not already in her mind, is and is not accessible, obscured from view like the cause of the narrator’s illness. As the narrator falls into the space of reading so Alcyone falls into the space of sleep; ‘romaunce’ and dream are alike texts that seem to come from elsewhere but are in fact closely aligned with the matter of the subjects’ own psyches. Entrance into the cave of sleep seems to figure an entrance into the complex and incomplete process of translation, dramatized overtly by the literariness of Chaucer’s translations of sources, but concerned in its deep structure with discovering what the body needs to say.

Bring up the Body: The ‘Quaynt’ Space of the Dream As several critics and a number of this volume’s essays have noted, Chaucer makes a singular and instructive change to his Ovidian original (and the version in Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse) in having Juno instruct her

35 36

Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1982), p. 88. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, pp. 100–1.

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messenger to tell Morpheus to take up the body of Ceyx itself, and present this body to Alcyone in her dream: That he take up Seys body the kynge, That lyeth ful pale and nothynge rody. B[i]d hym crepe into the body And doo hit goon to Alchione …

(BD 142–5)

In Ovid’s version, by contrast, Morpheus is a cunning ‘simulator’ of the human ‘figura’ who merely assumes Ceyx’s appearance for the purposes of this instructive dream. This is also what we find in Machaut and in the Ovide Moralisé – an emphasis on taking on the ‘semblance d’umaine’ rather than taking up the actual body.37 To consider this question more fully, we need to turn to the next stage of the narrator’s experience, the dream in which he encounters the mysterious figure known as the Black Knight or the Man in Black, usually thought to represent John of Gaunt, in mourning for his dead wife, Blanche of Lancaster. In her interpretation of Chaucer’s use of Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse in the dream’s reworking of Ovid’s text, Deanne Williams suggests that the importing of a literal body is primarily the sign of ‘the difference between French figural interpretation and English literalism’.38 Observing that the Man in Black at first speaks in verse clearly indebted in both form and content to French courtly poetry, she offers a rich interpretation of the moment at which he offers his own, very English elegy (at 1175ff) as a key to what she sees as the Book of the Duchess’s function as a ‘manifesto for English poetry’.39 One can agree with Williams’ point here while also noticing that the narrator has heard a variation on this song before, when he first encounters the Man in Black and overhears his ‘compleynt’. In the closing stages of the poem when the knight offers to share his first song with the narrator, he explains: ‘Algatis songes thus I made / Of my felynge, myn hert to glade’ (1171–2, italics mine). The earlier complaint is similarly inner-directed, as the narrator explains: ‘with a dedely sorwful soune / He made of ryme X vers or twelfe / Of a compleynt, to hymselfe’ (462–4). In the complaint the knight refers to her as his ‘lady bryght’ and his ‘lady swete / That was so faire, so fresh, so fre’ (477, 483–4); these phrases find close echoes in the first song, in which he praises the ‘swete wyght’ and his ‘lady that is so faire and bryght’ (1176, 1180). Williams’ observations about the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of this first song therefore also hold true of the earlier complaint – which occurs

37

38 39

Ovide moralisé, poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle publié d’après tous les manuscrits connus, ed. C. de Boer, Martina G. de Boer, and Jeanette Th. M. Van’t Sant, 5 vols (Amsterdam, 1915–38; repr. 1966–68), vol. 4, line 3524. Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), p. 27. Ibid., p. 28.



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before the knight launches into the description of his lady that is so densely informed by allusions to the dits amoureux.40 The implication of this circular return to a ‘first’ song that is ‘second’ in our reading of the poem is that, in the earlier scene, the complaint itself is still embedded in the knight’s own mind, expressing but not communicating his ‘felynge’ – which in this sense mirrors the narrator’s own impacted ‘felynge’. The description of the first complaint as ‘a dedely sorwful soune’ brings us back to the cave of sleep in which running water ‘made a dedely slepyynge soun’, and suggests both that Ovid’s text has run into the dream and that the complaint itself belongs to the world of dreams – isn’t fully conscious. The fact that the narrator overhears the complaint suggests not that the knight can publicly articulate his suffering but rather that the narrator has reached the point that he can begin to articulate his suffering ‘to hymselfe’. The cave of sleep is precisely that point of inner translation. But it is clear that in this self-overhearing the narrator does not hear the crucial element of the complaint – that the beloved is dead, which the complaint clearly tells him (481–4). So the shift from the patchwork of French quotations to the English song is actually a recapitulation of an English complaint that the speaker was earlier simply unable fully to hear. And he is still unable to hear it until the very end of the poem, when the dreamer asks, ‘Where [is] she now?’ (1298) By this point, the dreamer is ready to hear what the Black Knight is now able to say out loud: ‘She ys ded’ (1309). The connections between the complaint and the world of sleep and thus between the story of Alcyone and the story of the Black Knight emerge precisely through these allusive repetitions that seem to belong less to the semantic realm than to the partially conceptualized realm of the affects; it is through the sounds and rhythms of repetitions like ‘dedely soun’ that we are alerted to the potentially meaningful connection between two distinct textual locations. As Kathleen Stewart argues in her book Ordinary Affects, affects work ‘not through “meanings” per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds’.41 The dynamic insurgence of affective ‘felyng’ within the semiotic layers of the text operates at the level of repetitions and

40

41

Lines 817–1040, for example, are particularly indebted to passages from Machaut’s Remede de Fortune and Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne. For detailed unpacking of the allusions, see the Riverside Chaucer, p. 973, lines 817–1040n. See also Helen Phillips’s excellent discussion of how the ‘evocation of a discourse … identified with the dits amoureux’ operates in Chaucer’s poem: ‘Fortune and the Lady: Machaut, Chaucer, and the Intertextual “Dit”’, Nottingham French Studies 38/2 (1999), 120–36. But note also Jamie Fumo’s discussion of the important influence of critics who emphasize Chaucer’s internationalism rather than prioritizing either English or French: Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (Cardiff, 2015), pp. 74–5. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC, 2007), p. 3.

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half-heard echoes to push at the boundaries of what the poem makes semantically available, to paraphrase Raymond Williams’ phrase.42 Indeed, Chaucer has chosen the dream-like text and the highly textual dream as transitional spaces precisely because those spaces are more fluid and soluble, and thus responsive to experiences ‘to which the fixed forms do not speak at all, which indeed they do not recognize’.43 The emergence of dynamic ‘felyng’ in the dream space returns us to the startling introduction of the ‘dreynt body’ in Alcyone’s dream. Chaucer may, as Deanne Williams argues, be telling us something about the awkwardness of inhabiting a French form – ‘the sense of being weighted down by a body of work’.44 But at the same time this body also forcefully draws attention to itself as a body rather than a figura of one – a real, physiological body whose presence in the dream remains ontologically puzzling. It is as though Chaucer has worked backwards from Alcyone’s startling vision of the body washing up in the sea in Ovid’s version (which he does not include), and places that body instead in the dream itself. It is the body that speaks to her in the dream, through the puppetry of Morpheus, to be sure, but it is still Ceyx’s own body. Kruger also observes that ‘Alcyone’s dream is … striking for its strong physicality’, arguing that this paves the way for the dream’s focus on bodily illness.45 I would suggest instead, more radically, that the dream opens up a space in which the body speaks. While it is true that the ‘Man in Black exchanges his fundamentally acorporeal “French” hermeneutic for a more straightforward and corporeal “English” idiom’, 46 therefore, it is also more radically true that the poem’s project from the beginning has been to advance a translation of the body’s needs, desires, and sufferings into emotive language, and only thus to attempt a cure of the narrator’s sickness. The coincidence in Chaucer’s project of the introduction of the body into the dream and the translation of his French sources into recognizably different and English ones suggests an intervention in what Barbara Rosenwein has very usefully called the dominant ‘emotional community’, which in Chaucer’s case happened to deploy the courtly language of the French dits to express feelings of love and loss. Readily available emotion scripts can tend to narrow and predetermine the range of feelings that can make their way into language in particular communities – which can, as Rosenwein points out, be textual communities.47 However, emotives always have the potential for contestatory departures from the accepted emotion scripts; they are ‘first drafts that press for reformulation, but all too often second drafts are not 42 43 44 45 46 47

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 134. Ibid., p. 130. Williams, French Fetish, p. 27. Kruger, ‘Medical and Moral Authority’, p. 63. Williams, French Fetish, p. 27. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, p. 25.



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permitted’.48 They are translation tasks, bringing into words a complex set of material that, as Reddy notes, always exceeds the emotion language available.49 Reddy mentions in passing that some of this material can be firmly somatic in nature – as in ANS or endocrine-system arousal – and is barely glimpsed at a conscious level; the very attempt to make this translation has effects that can be both ‘self-altering’ and ‘self-exploratory’.50 In this respect, Reddy argues, the emotive is analogous to J. L. Austin’s concept of the performative utterance, the utterance that in its very enunciation makes something happen in the world (as in: ‘I promise’).51 Although emotives may at first blush seem to be closer to constative (descriptive) utterances than performative ones, Reddy indicates that the ‘exterior referent’ that an emotive appears to point at is not passive in the formulation of the emotive, and it emerges from the act of uttering in a changed state … Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions.52

The unlooked-for appearance of the body in the dream, therefore, seems to signal the emergence of ‘visceral forces [from] beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing’ in the narrator. The key lines in the dream contain Ceyx’s announcement of his own death:53 Awake! Let be your sorwful lyfe, For in your sorwe there lyth no rede. For certes, swete, I am but dede.

(202–4)

Although Ovid’s Ceyx makes a similar statement about his own death (‘occidimus’, Met. 11.662), neither Ovid’s nor Machaut’s Ceyx–Morpheus exhorts Alcyone to ‘awake’ in this way. The body that is obtrusively and bizarrely in the dream as opposed to merely represented in the dream thus primarily serves to convey the message that Alcyone should wake up to the fact that Ceyx is really dead, which involves allowing the impacted bodily feelings of horror and sorrow to make their way through the kind of internal translation that is the first step towards the production of the emotive. But Chaucer initially cuts short this project of translation. For having told us that Alcyone dies only three days after her dream of the body, Chaucer’s narrator then adds, seemingly gratuitously: 48 49 50 51 52 53

Ibid., p. 19. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, p. 103. Ibid., p. 103. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 1975). Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, p. 105. The phrase comes from Gregg and Seigworth’s working definition of affect in The Affect Reader, p. 1.

84  Marion Wells But what she sayede more in that swowe I may not telle yow as nowe; Hyt were to longe for to dwelle.

(BD 215–17)

This occupatio reminds us of the very similar move that the narrator makes regarding his own suffering (‘passe we over untyl efte’, 41).54 He chooses not to translate the affective shock experienced by Alcyone into words, but in the absence of clear meaning the text nonetheless registers again the existence of forces and shocks passing through the body. It is as though there is still a body to be accommodated – or buried, as Ceyx himself says (‘Bury my body’, 207). But we don’t see Alcyone burying the body, since she never encounters it as she does in Ovid’s text. Nor, as several critics have pointed out, is her own demise softened or transformed by the metamorphosis that saves the couple in the original version (and the French translations). The Ovidian metamorphosis emerges directly from the action of complaint. The excessive fullness (‘plenum … querelae’, 11.734) of Alcyone’s affect pushes her first towards certain death and then through the miraculous transformation into a shape that forever represents that grief. Although the metamorphosis rescues Alcyone from death, therefore, it also blocks the ongoing translation of affect into emotion and fixes her body in a form ‘full of complaint’. This moment is, in fact, a perfect dramatization of what distinguishes the complaint from the elegy as a poetic genre; the complaint, as Mark Rasmussen has noted in reference to Spenser’s complaints, leaves the speaker unconsoled, while the elegy undertakes what Freud sees as the central work of mourning – learning to let go of the beloved object and accept that it is lost.55 Instead of a literal transformation like Ovid’s, Chaucer gives us the dream in which the grieving woman has become a grieving young man, and in the place of the occupatio that blocks Alcyone’s complaint we have the ‘compleynt’ that the Black Knight utters ‘to hymselfe’. In place of the ‘swete hert’ who is the beloved Alcyone, Chaucer presents a dream that is ‘inly swete’ and framed as a hunt for the ‘hert’ – which turns out to be a potentially homoerotic object. Even more oblique is the transformation of the dead body of Ceyx itself, which we have been tracing from Ovid into Chaucer’s oddly literal dream. In her command to Morpheus (through her messenger), Juno describes Ceyx’s body prior to its infiltration by Morpheus as ‘pale and nothynge rody’ (143). The narrator describes the Black Knight very similarly as ‘ful petuose pale and nothynge red’ (470). Beyond the more overt conflation of Alcyone and the Black Knight is a conflation of the Knight and Ceyx, 54 55

Williams, French Fetish, p. 25, thinks that the occupatio refers to the metamorphosis itself, but it seems quite clear that it refers to Alcyone’s complaint – ‘what she sayede more’. According to Rasmussen, ‘Elegy works upon loss, works upon death, to create something new … This is precisely what complaint will not do. Its strength comes from its impassioned refusal to “get over” the trauma it mourns’ (‘Complaints and Daphnaida, 1591’, in Oxford Handbook to Edmund Spenser [Oxford, 2015], pp. 218–36 [at p. 223]).



The Translation of Affect in Chaucer and Spenser  85

suggesting perhaps how dangerous this melancholy suffering is to the health not only of the knight but also of the narrator. The obliquity of these shifts indicates the difficulty of making the transition along the continuum from affect to emotion, especially given the disavowed nature of melancholic loss. When the narrator engages the Black Knight in conversation he moves even closer to the role of confabulator – not only to the knight but to himself, as well: Me thynketh in grete sorowe I yow see. But certys sir, yif that yee Wolde ought discure me youre woo I wolde, as wys, God helpe me soo, Amende hyt yif I kan or may.

(547–51)

The word ‘discure’ (MED s.v. ‘discoveren’ [v.]) has several meanings highly pertinent to the ‘translation’ process underway here. It can mean ‘to expose; reveal to view, lay open’ (def. 2); ‘to disclose, make known, divulge, reveal’ (def. 3); but in its punning connection with the verb ‘curen’, which means ‘to restore to health, cure, heal’ (MED s.v. ‘curen’ [v.(2)], def. 3[a]), the word ‘discure’ seems to indicate a process of curing by means of disclosure or, I would suggest, translation. This meaning is supported by the word ‘amende’, which means ‘make well, cure’ (MED s.v. ‘amenden’ [v.], def. 3[a]) or ‘relieve suffering or grief’ (def. 4). And when the narrator repeatedly says, in response to the narrator’s baffled questioning, ‘Thou wost ful lytel what thou menyst: / I have loste more than thow wenyst’ (743–4), the exchange seems to adumbrate the painful process of exposing or laying open feelings that do not yet have adequate emotional expression, but are pushing towards the creation of a new, exploratory emotive. When the narrator first encounters the knight, the knight’s complaint seems irreducibly internal and bodily; it is described, as Adin Esther Lears notes, as a ‘flood of words that seems to be just another form of fluid in his economy of humors’:56 … his spiritis wexen dede. The bloode was fled, for pure drede, Doune to hys hert to make hym warme.

(489–91)

Just as the speaking of the complaint, albeit ‘to hymselve’, participates in the operation of the fungible humoral body, so telling the complaint – to another – may help to heal the wounded body by redistributing the pain; it is in this belief that the narrator presses the knight to ‘telleth [him] of [his] sorwes smerte; / Paraventure hyt may ease [his] herte’ (555–6). The role of 56

Adin Esther Lears, ‘Something from Nothing: Melancholy, Gossip, and Chaucer’s Poetics of Idling in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 48/2 (2013), 205–21 (at p. 211).

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the confabulator, then, as Francis Bacon will later write of the friend, is to ventilate and relieve ‘whatever lieth upon the heart … in a kind of civil shrift or confession’.57 If the narrator steps into the role of confabulator, friend, and confessor here, he also steps into a homosocial intimacy that may invite erotic readings.58 Chaucer emphasizes the intimacy of their physical closeness as well as the focused attention and mutually imbricated vocabulary of their discourse: ‘Good sir, telle me al hooly: In what wyse, how, why, and wherefore That ye have thus youre blysse lore.’ ‘Blythely’, quod he, ‘come sytte adoon; I telle hyt the up a condicioun That thou shalt hooly with al thy wytte Doo thyn entent to herkene hitte.’ ‘Yis syr.’ ‘Swere thy trouthe therto.’ ‘Gladly.’ ‘Do thanne holde here[t]o.’ ‘I shal ryght blythely, so God me save, Hooly with al the witte I have Here yow, as wel as I kan.’

(746–57, italics mine)

In this passage the reciprocal semantic meaning of the words seems to dramatize an embodied affective connection between the two figures, conveyed by the material quality of their commingling voices. 59 Each man commits ‘blythely’ to what is asked of him by the other in a mutual agreement – one to tell everything (‘hooly’), the other to listen with all his attention (‘hooly’) – that is signaled by the swearing of ‘trouthe’. The term ‘blythe’ reiterated here is linked etymologically to ‘bliss’, the bliss that is precisely the lost object of the complaint (‘ye have … youre blysse lore’), and it also echoes the last words of Ceyx in Alcyone’s dream: ‘[F]arewel, swete, my worldes blysse: / I pray God youre sorwe lysse. / To lytel while oure blysse lasteth’ (209–10). The ‘blysse’ lost by the knight is associated by this echo with the concept of the individual beloved (‘my worldes blysse’) and the more general concept of happiness (‘oure blysse’). Ceyx’s formulation in the dream offers the Augustinian notion that our happiness is fragile precisely when (and because) our love objects are mortal and inevitably impermanent. The moralizing reading of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone in the Ovide Moralisé reads the transfor57 58 59

Qtd in Schoenfeldt, ‘Give Sorrow Words’, p. 155. See Lears for a good analysis of the connection between the structure of this dialogue and confession: ‘Something from Nothing’, pp. 213–15. Aristotle’s material conception of voice is relevant here: ‘[voice] consists in the impact of the inspired air upon what is called the windpipe under the agency of the soul … that which causes the impact must have a soul, and accompany it with some phantasm.’ Aristotle, De Anima 2.8.420 (in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 2 vols [Princeton, NJ, 1984]).



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mation as hinging on this notion of the impermanence of worldly happiness: ‘Vaine est la mondaine delice / Et pleine de muableté / Par sa grant variableté / Puet l’en dire qu’il est oisiaux’.60 It seems very possible that ‘worldly blisse’ is Chaucer’s translation of ‘mondaine delice’, in which case the emphasis on ‘blysse’ and ‘blythe’ in this exchange between the narrator and the knight is particularly interesting. Rather than following this reading of the metamorphosis as an Augustinian allegory about the impermanence of worldly love, Chaucer cuts off the Ovidian story before the metamorphosis or allegory has a chance to happen. The metamorphosis occurs instead within the dream frame to produce a masculine figure who merges characteristics of both Alcyone and Ceyx, and with whom the narrator enters into an intimate discourse. At the same time, the heterosexual and worldly ‘blysse’ bemoaned by Ceyx as permanently lost seems to re-emerge as a more fluid affective attachment in the queer space of the dream, whose ‘inly swete’ affect replaces the lost ‘swete hert’ of the story. This discourse allows both participants to act ‘blythely’ in relation to one another, and to enact in doing so a new and different version of bliss. If, as Sara Ahmed has suggested, the ‘body learns by switching affections’, we might see in this enlivening and mutually imbricated dialogue a decisive move beyond the apathy and nothingness of the opening sequence.61 The knight’s account of what he has lost emphasizes the effect of one body on another in ways that reflect back on the ‘confabulation’ between himself and the narrator. His description of his youthful impressionability makes use of the Aristotelian figure of the tabula rasa to explain sense perception:62 Peraventure I was thereto moste able As a white walle or a table, For hit ys redy to cachche and take Al that men wil theryn make, Whethirso men wil portrey or peynt, Be the werkes never so queynt.

(BD 779–84)

Having set the scene of his openness to impression, the knight then describes how love made its mark on him: ‘she ful sone in my thoght, / As helpe me God, so was ykaught’ (837–8). This notion that the world impresses itself on the mind in the formation (literally) of perceptual experience has far-reaching

60

61 62

Ovide Moralisé, ed. de Boer et al., vol. 4, line 4140. This work, composed in Old French by an anonymous author in the early fourteenth century, provides a complete translation and adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, together with a moralizing commentary. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC, 2010), p. 35. Aristotle, De Anima 2.12; and Aquinas on the ‘species’ marked in the tabula rasa of the intellect, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Introductions, Notes, Appendices, and Glossaries, ed. Thomas Gilby et al., 61 vols (Cambridge, 1964), vol. 11, 1a. 79, 2.

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philosophical consequences that extend well beyond the scope of this essay. The aspect of this perceptual model that I wish to emphasize here is the way that the inward experience of a previously inexpressible psychosomatic impression – what we have been calling an affect – gets translated into an emotive within the context of a mutually transformative dialogue. Later philosophers developed the theory of the impression as a kind of sympathetic entrainment much more fully; Nicolas Malebranche, for example, calls this kind of exchange ‘compassion in bodies’, a phrase that captures just the kind of affective exchange I am concerned with here.63 The shift from lost ‘bliss’ to a ‘blythe’ exchange between living beings rejuvenates the body and allows the ‘secret’ melancholic object to be expressed in an embodied discourse, or an emotive. Chaucer’s reinsertion of the body into the dream takes on a new significance within this framework; the bodies of both narrator and knight, which are frequently described as in one way or another ‘dead’ regain vitality in this exchange of ‘impressions’. Sara Ahmed has argued that the material ‘impression’ made on us by others is in fact what gives rise in the first place to an experience of inhabiting a particular body – we could think of this as the experience of being touched (in both senses).64 Chaucer’s translation of the language of Ovid and the French dits into English elegy marks a deeper translation, of inscrutable bodily affect into an emotive form. That this emotive stretches and pushes against existing emotion scripts is indicated by the pervasive queering of the context in which the narrator encounters the knight. When the knight describes his mind’s impressionability in terms of a ‘white walle or a table’ on which can be impressed ‘Al that men wil theryn make, / Whethirso men wil portrey or peynt, / Be the werkes never so queynt’, he specifies that it is men who will write these impressions into his mind – including the impression of his dead wife, White. Chaucer’s later use of a similar expression (and term: ‘queynt’) in House of Fame in the context of a reference to the affair between Dido and Aeneas suggests that it is specifically in respect to love that his emotion language runs up against a barrier: ‘what shulde I speke more queynte, / Or peyne me my wordes peynte, / To speke of love?’ (HF 245–6). This occupatio recalls others that we have noted in Book of the Duchess, and suggests that the topic of love is somehow beyond available language resources, and as such requires new, exploratory emotion language that the narrator either does not have or will not directly share. The meaning of the word ‘queynt’ ranges from ‘wise, clever; skillful, wily; deceptive’ (MED s.v. ‘queynt[e [adj.] def. 1[a–c]) to ‘strange, unusual, peculiar, special’ (def. 3[a]). In each of these 63 64

Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. and ed. Thomas Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge, 1980), p. 113. Sara Ahmed, ‘Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others’, Theory, Culture, and Society 21/2 (2004), 25–42. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham, NC, 2002), p. 17.



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cases, the occupatio suggests an emotional referent that resides at the edge of what is natural, usual, or, in Chaucer’s terminology, ‘kynde’, and in this sense has some of the valence of our modern concept ‘queer’ – particularly in Sedgwick’s definition of that term as quoted above (p. 78).65 Only the dream frame provides the space in which the ‘queynt’ work of affective translation can take place and desiring energies can be freed to take new turns. If the Black Knight is able to utter ‘to hymselfe’ that his beloved White is dead at the beginning of the dream, his alter ego the narrator is not able to hear it. But once the two figures enter into their mutual pledge to listen ‘hooly’ and to tell ‘hooly’, the ensuing emotional utterance is, as Reddy suggests, both self-altering and relational. When the narrator asks again what the knight has lost, he repeats his earlier phrasing, but with an essential gloss: [‘]I have lost more than thow wenyst’ … ‘Allas, sir, how? What may that be?’ ‘She ys ded.’ ‘Nay!’ ‘Yis, be my trouthe.’

(1306, 1308–9)

We can see both the relational and performative aspects of the emotive at work in this exchange; the knight’s very act of glossing his complaint for the narrator breaks up the circularity of that form and allows the emotion to circulate differently in this different space. At the same time, at a narrative level the dream text also engages with the energies that are glossed over by the trope of occupatio but that are ‘impressed’ complexly (queynte-ly) upon the body of narrator and knight: Thoght I, ‘Thys ys so queynt a swevene That I wol, be processe of tyme, Fonde to put this swevene in ryme As I kan best, and that anoon.’ This was my swevene; now hit ys doon.

(1330–4)

By listening to the knight’s emotional utterance, the narrator has himself received the ‘queynt’ impress that was so difficult for the knight to describe in words.66 The receiving of this impression is coterminous with the knight’s explication of his own experience – hence the simultaneity of the end of the knight’s utterance and the ‘already done’ quality of the dream: ‘hit ys doon’. The dream fills the space of the rhetorical occupatio, drawing out the ‘queynt’ marks on the hidden ‘white walle’ of the inner world and directing them to the outer world, figured here by the ‘wallys white’ that mark the way ‘homewarde’, and ultimately the white page in our own hands.67 65 66 67

The labyrinthine house of Fame is described as a ‘queynt hous’, and Susan Schibanoff argues partly on this basis that it is a uterine space (Chaucer’s Queer Poetics, p. 194). Lears, ‘Something from Nothing’, p. 220. Richard Rambuss has argued persuasively that the white castle on a hill evokes St John’s vision of the New Jerusalem. In this context, the movement homeward suggests a movement

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Epilogue: Spenser’s Daphnaïda and the Intransigent Emotion of Complaint A brief consideration of Spenser’s reworking of Chaucer’s poem will help us see more clearly – primarily through its very different ending – what is at stake in Chaucer’s project to translate the affective energies of the body into a poem about grief. The relationship of Spenser’s Daphnaïda to his other work, and especially the Faerie Queene, provides valuable context for understanding this poem’s treatment of grief and mourning. Published in early 1591, right on the heels of the volume of shorter poems called Complaints, Daphnaïda not only continues Spenser’s exploration of the complaint genre but also engages with his ongoing interest in the nexus of reciprocal relations between mourning, melancholia, and despair that is at the heart of the structure of the first edition of The Faerie Queene, published in 1590. Like Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Daphnaïda addresses a real situation of loss and grief. The wife of Spenser’s acquaintance Sir Arthur Gorges, Lady Douglas Howard, had recently died, and Spenser’s poem was probably written only a few months after her death.68 But while most (not all) readers of the Book of the Duchess agree that at least some recuperative movement is indicated in this poem’s structure and ending, no reader can find any evidence of consolation at the end of the Daphnaïda. Although the poem follows its Chaucerian model very closely in matters both large and small, I will focus here on its departures from this model and its very different attitude toward the kinds of translation I explored earlier. The complaint of the Black Knight triggers, as we saw, a significant internal disruption of spirits and bodily equilibrium. But this episode prompts the engagement of the narrator with the knight that brings the two figures into an intimate discourse. A similar moment happens at the very end of Daphnaïda, after Alcyon has uttered the much longer complaint that comprises the bulk of the poem: Thus when he ended had his heavie plaint, … His cheeks wext pale, and sprights began to faint, As if againe he would have fallen to ground. (Daph. 540–3)69

The similarity of the two moments only serves to emphasize the quite different outcome in the earlier text, in which the Black Knight, having finally

68 69

away from the circularity of melancholy toward an apocalyptic revelation that will offer final consolation. Rambuss, ‘“Process of tyme”: History, Consolation, and Apocalypse in the Book of the Duchess’, Exemplaria 2/2 (1990), 659–83 (at p. 662). Jonathan Gibson, ‘The Legal Context of Spenser’s Daphnaïda’, RES 55/218 (2004), 22–44. Quotations of Daphnaïda are from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, gen. ed. William A. Oram (New Haven, CT, 1989).



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managed to make the narrator understand that his beloved is dead, wends his way ‘homewarde’. Alcyon refuses the narrator’s invitation to stay with him: ‘he no waie recomforted would be, / Nor suffer solace to approach him nie’ (547–8), thus refusing the very turn toward intimate connection that is transformative in the Book of the Duchess. The Black Knight’s overheard complaint is the beginning of the conversation between himself and the narrator, while Alcyon’s complaint is not only almost coterminous with the poem itself but is also a monologic text that makes no room for the overlapping exchanges that take place in the Book of the Duchess.70 The structure of the Book of the Duchess suggests that it is through the translation practices of reading and dreaming (each dependent on the other in this text) that the narrator and the knight begin to excavate the ‘queynt’ matter impacted in the body of the narrator. Spenser abandons the dream narrative. Instead, he uses the promenade poem as a means to bring his narrator and central mourner, Alcyon, together. Alcyon’s name clearly marks Spenser’s debt to Chaucer, whose debt to Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone we have explored; but the feminization of the mourner does not allow for the play of identification between the narrator and the knight and both Ceyx and Alcyone, reverting instead to a normative reading of grieving as a feminine occupation deleterious to the male body. And while Chaucer deploys the occupatio to open up space and ambiguity in his poem’s presentation of emotion, Spenser fills the space of the occupatio in Chaucer’s text with a long complaint whose structure seems to recall the long but usually unanswered laments of the heroines of Ovid’s Heroides. Indeed, as Jonathan Gibson has interestingly argued, there is textual evidence that Spenser may have known the collection of poems by the real-life model for Alcyon, Arthur Gorges, whose long poems relied quite heavily on Turberville’s English versions of the Heroides.71 Perhaps following the model of the protagonists of the Heroides, Alcyon clearly emerges as an unconsolable mourner. He has many of the attributes that will later characterize Despair, who represents the nadir of Red Crosse’s quest: His carelesse locks, uncombed and unshorne Hong long adowne, and beard all over growne, That well he seemd to be sum wight forlorne; Downe to the earth his heavie eyes were throwne As loathing light … (Daph. 43–7, compare Faerie Queene 1.9.35)

70 71

Jamie Fumo makes a similar point, noting that ‘the monologia of lyric displaces the dialogic possibilities of narrative’: Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, p. 172. Gibson, ‘Legal Context’, pp. 31–3.

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The posture of Alcyon, with his eyes turned heavily towards the ground, signals the connection between this figure and the medieval sin of acedia, or sloth, represented typically as a woman gazing to earth.72 As I have argued elsewhere, acedia is closely related to both melancholy and despair; many medieval sources understand the atrabilious syndrome as the cause of acedia, and Spenser’s poem reflects the often imprecise fusion of this family of psycho-spiritual disorders.73 If Alcyon’s physiognomy suggests a link to the figure of Despair, his words are also clearly symptomatic of his dire spiritual state: Who life dooes loath, and longs to bee unbound From the strong shackles of fraile flesh (quoth he) Nought cares at all, what they that live on ground Deeme the occasion of his death to bee.

(Daph. 85–8)

The emphasis here on a lack of care, echoed above in his furious rejection of compassion – ‘ne doo I care, that any should bemone / My hard mishap’ (76–7, italics mine) – directly engages with the etymological meaning of acedia (from Greek, a-kedos, without care). Characterized by both a bodily sluggishness or laziness and a spiritual turn away from God’s grace, the spiritual sin of acedia culminates in this suicidal carelessness about life itself. If there is a suggestion of acedia behind Chaucer’s narrator’s apathetic ‘felyng in nothyng’, Spenser’s narrator has fully embraced the illness. Morbid exacerbation of one’s own suffering, along with a fundamental self-­absorption, are constitutive features of this acedia-like melancholia, and Alcyon, whose ‘bread’ is the anguish of his mind and who drinks his own tears (Daph. 375–6), manifests both in a large degree. Alcyon’s ‘selfe-consuming paine’ also highlights the perversion of the will (the intellectual appetite) that Aquinas diagnoses as the primary root of acedia.74 As Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung has shown, Aquinas’s definition of acedia as ‘sorrow over … an internal and divine good [in us]’ emphasizes the acidiosus as one who rejects a fundamental relationship or friendship with God, a friendship that is the very wellspring of charity.75 If acedia is at root a presumptuous rejection of humanity’s constitutive friendship with God, Alcyon’s angry rejection of this ‘friendship’ extends to

72 73

74 75

Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis, MN, 1993), p. 7. Marion Wells, The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance (Stanford, CA, 2007), pp. 14–15. See also the discussions of acedia by Barootes and Davis, in this volume. Colleen McCluskey, Thomas Aquinas on Moral Wrongdoing (Cambridge, 2016), p. 168. Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo, q. 11, a 2 resp.; quoted in Rebecca Kondyndyk DeYoung, ‘Resistance to the Demands of Love: Aquinas on the Vice of Acedia’, The Thomist 68 (2004), 173–204.



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a disdain for human companionship in general. His rejection of human relationship on the basis that it is ‘vaine and transitorie’ (Daph. 495) places him outside the generative possibilities of human life – either literally procreative, as in the Garden of Adonis, or figuratively productive in dialogue with an interlocutor. Alcyon’s complaint neither invites nor needs an audience, and certainly does not generate an intimate space of mutual attention. Its monolithic presentation of its author’s ‘miserable case’ admits no interruption or dilation but instead marks its interior circularity with an unchanging refrain repeated seven times: ‘Weep Shepheard, weep, to make my undersong.’ The other is imagined only as a contributor to a seamless song of complaint. The complaint may be a performance, but it is not performative in the sense we explored in relation to the Book of the Duchess, and it does not, therefore, have the ‘self-altering’ or exploratory function of that poem’s emotives. Alcyon informs the narrator that Daphne ‘now is dead’ before his complaint rather than as a precipitate of a lively emotional dialogue, and the emotion accompanying the statement (the ‘stormie passion of his troubled brest’) mirrors an unchanged emotional state at the end (‘outragious passion’). Alcyon’s complaint undertakes no effort of translation, in the sense that we explored in relation to Chaucer’s poem; he is neither translating his own affect ‘to hymselfe’ as the Black Knight does at the beginning, nor to his interlocutor, who in the earlier poem begs the knight to ‘discure’ his woe. The corollary to this emotional rigidity is the systematic shutting down of Alcyon’s body, sense by sense: ‘I hate to speake … I hate to heare … I hate to tast’ (414–20). The last lines of this stanza sum up the difference between Alcyon and his counterpart in Chaucer’s poem: ‘I hate to feele, my flesh is numbed with feares: / So all my senses from me are bereft’ (419–20). The intransigent nature of Alcyon’s grief in Daphnaïda is a function of the rejection of relationality (with God and human beings alike) constitutive of acedia; by the same token, the expression of his grief remains within a rigidly demarcated verse and generic form that do not allow for interruption or dialogue.76 If Chaucer’s poem beautifully demonstrates the therapeutic value of attention to the ‘awake body’ whose desires and energies it taps into (and translates) in the dream, Spenser’s dark revision of his predecessor’s poem focuses instead on the psychological (and poetic) impact of closing off the affective sources of emotional utterance.

76

In this volume Jeff Espie develops the notion that Alcyon rejects physical, lineal descent (consanguinity) in favour of a kind of monumental contiguity, figured in the literary grave. This interesting analysis offers a complementary interpretation to my own of the significance of Alcyon’s affective rigidity.

II

The Intertextual Duchess

5 Alcyone’s Grave: Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid JEFF ESPIE

Chaucer is the poet of unrealized endings; Chaucer is the Ovidian who habitually omits Ovidian metamorphoses; Chaucer is the father of English poetry. This essay argues that these critical commonplaces, notwithstanding their continued relevance and heuristic value, might all profitably be qualified, and that the Book of the Duchess, especially in its narrative of Ceyx and Alcyone, provides occasion to do so.1 Represented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, rewritten in Chaucer’s Duchess, recast in Spenser’s Daphnaïda, Alcyone comprises part of a literary history linked around the grave: its connective powers, its memorial capacities, its metafictional possibilities. Ovid’s Alcyone, envisaging the inscription on her own tomb, has a previously underexplored connection with the desperate lovers of the Heroides, and, as I suggest in part I, it shapes Chaucer’s decision to excise her avian transformation from his retelling of the story. He refrains from faithfully representing the traditional Ovidian metamorphosis, but this, as the link with the Heroides implies, may attest his affinity with an earlier model in Ovid’s career. Alcyone’s plan for her tomb, further, marks in Ovid a potential but unfulfilled conclusion, and though Chaucer doesn’t afford it to Alcyone herself, he incorporates its memorializing spirit into his dream about the bereaved Black Knight. The poet of endings finds an unrealized ending already in his predecessor, and transforms it into an artistic analogy between the monumental grave for the dead Blanche of Lancaster, constructed contemporaneously in St Paul’s cathedral, and the monumental tribute for the dead White, constructed figuratively in 1

For recent discussion of these commonplaces, see, respectively, Andrew Higl, Playing The Canterbury Tales: The Continuations and Additions (Farnham, Surrey, 2012), p. 150; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘Ovid and Ovidianism’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, ed. Rita Copeland (Oxford, 2016), pp. 187–208 (at p. 194); Joanna Bellis, ‘“Fresh anamalit termes”: The Contradictory Celebrity of Chaucer’s Aureation’, in Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, ed. Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 143–63 (at p. 143).

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his elegy. Spenser in Daphnaïda, as I show in part II, draws on both Ovid and Chaucer in making a grave into what Robert R. Edwards would call a poetic emblem: ‘a self-reflexive statement about poetic art’ and its place in a literary tradition.2 With another epigraphic inscription, this one imagined by a newly male Alcyon, Spenser generates a transhistorical connection among several poems that doesn’t rely solely on structures of genealogy or metaphors of literary paternity. His imitation of Chaucer, the father of English poetry, figures less as the descent from parent to child than as the touch between past and present.

I: Monument and Metamorphosis Having witnessed the transformation of his violent brother into a hawk and the solidification of a similarly violent wolf into a stone, Ceyx, King of Trachis, husband of Alcyone, decides to visit Apollo’s temple at Claros, hoping to find counsel after these disturbing events. His plan for a maritime voyage launches a narrative about separated lovers and their marital devotion which, as classicists have long recognized, holds a key place in the organizational structure of the Metamorphoses: it culminates the thematic block, stretching across six books, about ‘the pathos of love’, and it may even serve as an ‘alternative ending for the Metamorphoses as a whole’.3 The question of endings is, I would add, thematized in the tale itself, which presents at least two possible conclusions, both of which are organized around the idea of touch. In the first Alcyone passionately laments her husband’s untimely death and anticipates her own, resigning her life without resigning her connection to Ceyx. ‘I shall neither struggle’, she exclaims, nec te, miserande, relinquam et tibi nunc saltem veniam comes, inque sepulcro si non urna, tamen iunget nos littera: si non ossibus ossa meis, at nomen nomine tangam.

(Met. 11.704–7)

[nor will I abandon you, my poor one, and now at least I will come to you as your companion; and if not an urn, yet an inscription will join us in the grave; if not your bones with my bones, still will I touch your name with my name.]4 2

3 4

The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in the Early Narratives (Durham, NC, 1989), p. 23; cf. Robert W. Hanning, ‘Poetic Emblems in Medieval Narrative Texts’, in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. Lois Ebin (Kalamazoo, MI, 1984), pp. 1–32. The quotations are from, respectively, Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge, 1966), p. 263; and Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge, 2002), p. 259. Quoted from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1977), vol. 2. All translations of Ovid’s works are mine, prepared with the gracious assistance of David Adkins.



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Envisioning her own epitaph, Alcyone predicts that the written word may supplement two desires that had been previously frustrated. When Ceyx was preparing to depart on his journey, Alcyone begged him to take her with him, so that they could ‘suffer whatever comes … together’ [‘patiar … pariterque … quicquid erit’] (11.442–3). The wish to stay alongside Ceyx, which he denied when she first made it, is here pursued in a different manner: Alcyone now plans to join her husband not in a ship at sea but in the letters on their shared tomb. Similarly, when Morpheus assumed the guise of Ceyx and appeared in her chamber, Alcyone had reached out and tried to touch him. The longing for contact with her husband, which eluded her in the bedroom, is here too developed in another fashion: she now plans to touch not his hand in their bed but his name on their epitaph. The polyptotonic syntax of Ovid’s verse represents the kind of touch that Alcyone imagines: ‘nomen nomine tangam’. This touch will be a metaphoric one, generated through spatial proximity and apparently able to bridge the blank space between their contiguous names. In its supplementary capacity, the figurative touch moves Alcyone and her story beyond a series of poetic precedents. When she thinks she sees Ceyx at her bedside and tries to touch him literally, the dreaming Alcyone ‘groans, stirs her arms in sleep, and seeking his body, embraces the air alone’ [‘ingemit … motatque lacertos / per somnum corpusque petens amplectitur auras’] (11.674–5). Her disappointed grasp finds its most proximate forerunner in the previous book of the Metamorphoses, where Orpheus, looking back at Eurydice and seeing her slip into the underworld, frantically extends himself for her hand, but finds only ‘yielding air’ [‘cedentes … auras’] (10.59). Farther back in the literary tradition, though with equal vivacity, Alcyone’s tearful situation evokes books two and six of the Aeneid, where Aeneas fruitlessly tries to touch the shades of Creusa and Anchises, each ‘phantom / sifting through his fingers, / light as wind, quick as a dream in flight’ (Aen. 2.984–6; 6.809–11); book eleven of the Odyssey, where Odysseus reaches out in vain for the soul of Antikleia, which ‘fluttered out of’ his ‘hands like a shadow / or a dream’ (Ody. 11.207–8); and book twenty-three of the Iliad, where Achilles piteously grasps at the spirit of Patroklos, which vanishes ‘underground, like vapor’ (Ild. 23.100).5 For Ovid, Alcyone’s initial recapitulation of the literary– historical pattern is prelude to the provision of an alternative for it. On her tomb Alcyone will seek the coveted, yet traditionally disappointed, touch not in a physical body but in the written word. If one kind of touch has repeatedly yielded nothing save fleeting air, Ovid and Alcyone will locate another kind in the realm of perdurable letters. 5

The translations, cited parenthetically by book and line number, are from Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York, 2008), pp. 102, 205; Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York, 2007), p. 173, and The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, IL, 2011), p. 475.

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Ovid constructs the monumental writing against the precedent set by his Heroides. That poem is a collection of and about ‘litterae’, where the word signifies the variously tearful, anticipatory, and hostile epistles sent between separated lovers. Like the message inscribed on Alcyone’s hypothetical grave, the other kind of ‘littera’ similarly appeals to the sense of touch. When Leander longingly writes to his beloved Hero, he predicts that the ‘happy letter’ [‘felix … littera’] will gain a sensual connection with his lady: ‘soon she will stretch out her beautiful hand for you. Perhaps you will also be touched by her lips brought near, while she hastens to break your bands with her snow-white tooth’ [‘iam tibi formosam porriget illa manum. / forsitan admotis etiam tangere labellis, / rumpere dum niveo vincula dente volet’] (Her. 18.16–18).6 The letter functions as a textual simulacrum for the desire he cannot consummate in person. Separated only by the turbulent Hellespont, Leander is so close to Hero that, as he puts it: ‘I almost touch her with my hand, so near is she I love; but often, alas, this “almost” moves me to tears!’ [‘paene manu quod amo, tanta est vicinia, tango; / saepe sed, heu, lacrimas hoc mihi “paene” movet!’] (18.179–80). If not with his corporeal hand, Leander will instead receive his touch through the metonymic form of his letter, the product of his ‘right hand … on the sheet’ [‘cum charta dextra’] (18.20). Alcyone recalls the example of the Heroides, again using a ‘littera’ to simulate a touch, but she shifts the locus of contact from an epistle to an inscription, from lips touching a letter to name touching name. No longer between a living reader and a textual simulacrum, the projected touch is now imagined entirely through written words. Rather than touching his letter, Alcyone touches Ceyx in letters. The epitaph, the site of that touch, may well expand another model from the Heroides, looking back on the plaintive heroines who use their final words to predict the writing on their tombs. Hypermnestra ends her complaint by telling Lynceus to engrave a ‘brief inscription’ on her ‘sepulcher’ [‘titulo … sepulcra brevi’] (Her. 14.128), Dido finishes her epistle by wishing two lines of ‘verse’ inscribed on her ‘marble monument’ [‘tumuli marmore carmen’] (7.194–5), and Phyllis concludes her letter to Demophon with this plan for textual posterity: Inscribere meo causa invidiosa sepulcro. aut hoc aut simili carmine notus eris: phyllida demophoon leto dedit hospes amantem; ille necis causam praebuit, ipsa manum.

(2.145–8)

[You, the cause arousing hatred, will be inscribed on my tomb. Either by this or a similar verse you will be known: Demophon, her guest,

6

Quoted from Heroides and Amores, ed. and trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 1977).



Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid  101 slew Phyllis who loved him; he supplied the cause for her murder, she herself the hand.]

The end of her letter implicitly coincides with the end of her life, as Phyllis uses the same ‘manum’ – literally her last word – to finish writing her epitaph and to kill herself. She organizes her epitaph’s penultimate line with some equally devastating syntax. In its sequence Demophon is right next to Phyllis (‘phyllida demophoon’), an arrangement that ironically represents precisely what he refused to preserve in life: his stable and permanent proximity to his sometime lover. Alcyone, whose husband also sailed away, though for dramatically different reasons, builds on Phyllis’ lead, drawing out the hint of her epitaph while turning it to a new purpose. In her imagined future, Alcyone and Ceyx replace Phyllis and Demophon as the paired names on a tomb, but the proximity will now valorize the heroine’s continued bond with her husband instead of branding it in infamy. By projecting this inscribed connection, Alcyone outlines a potential conclusion for her story to which Ovid had previously made recourse. Like his Phyllis, Dido, and Hypermnestra, Ovid’s Alcyone envisions her epitaph at the same moment she stops her complaint. After the tomb the rest is silence, or so it appears: ‘Grief prevented further speech’ [‘plura dolor prohibet verboque’] (Met. 11.708). But yet the end is not. Despite their seemingly conclusive force, the epitaph’s letters stand neither as Alcyone’s sole legacy nor as her story’s definitive statement on the forms of touch. Unlike Dido, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra in the Heroides, Alcyone goes beyond the symbolic finality of the grave and continues her story, waking up the next morning, leaving her palace, and traveling to the seashore from which Ceyx departed. There, she sees a man’s body bobbing on the waves, soon realizes that it’s her dead husband, and, as she anxiously rushes toward him, transforms into a bird. Her marital devotion survives her physical metamorphosis. Just before she loses her human form, Alcyone extends her ‘trembling hands’ [‘trementes / manus’] (11.726–7) toward Ceyx’s corpse; she pursues the same passionate impulse as a bird, wrapping her newly generated wings around his body, kissing his lifeless lips with her newfound beak (11.736–8). Though the touches are cold and hard, Ceyx does indeed feel them. And the gods feel them too: they show pity for the lamentable display of affection by giving Ceyx an avian form as well (11.740–2). As the Halcyon birds, the lovers are triumphantly and finally united, gaining a reprieve from death, sustaining their marriage, and perpetuating themselves across time by producing copious offspring. The final sequence thus provides two counterpoints to the ideas Alcyone envisioned through her grave. At her story’s second ending, she now touches not her husband’s name but his lips; she now joins with him not through memorial lettering but through generative lovemaking. The connective power that Alcyone predicatively assigned to a monument is instead granted by a metamorphosis.

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When Chaucer recounts the story at the opening of his Duchess, he takes up the question of closure, imposing yet another and earlier ending on Alcyone, and omitting both the potentially conclusive Ovidian monument and the properly conclusive Ovidian metamorphosis. Beset by an unexplained and debilitating sorrow that prevents him from sleeping, the Chaucerian narrator decides to pass his night by reading a book, a ‘romaunce’ full of ‘fables / That clerkes had in olde tyme, / And other poetes, put in rime’, wherein he finds a wonderful account of Ceyx and Alcyone (BD 48, 52–4). The narrator’s bibliographic description suggests that the tale has a basis in both the original Ovidian narrative and latter-day mediations of it. Though written in the ‘olde tyme’ of ancient pagan culture when ‘men loved the lawe of kinde’ (56), the story is versified in some form of rhyme, rather than dactylic hexameter, and it may thereby garner its implicitly vernacular label of ‘romaunce’.7 The dual affiliations of the book are an emblem of Chaucer’s creative process: he crafts his version of the story with eclectic recourse to the Latin of Metamorphoses XI and to Machaut’s French redaction of it in La Fonteinne Amoreuse, while also incorporating supplementary interpretations of Ovid from Statius’ Thebaid and the anonymous Ovide Moralisé.8 Chaucer treats the Metamorphoses as a node in literary history, engaging and reworking its text itself as well as its reception history. Though he is of a piece with Machaut in substantially condensing the unusually long Ovidian narrative, Chaucer veers from his French precursor in the extent, nature, and self-consciousness of his poetic economy. Having already announced his plan ‘to tellen shortly’ (68) and eliminate textual details for which there is ‘no nede’ (190), the Chaucerian narrator caps his pathetic story with a spectacularly bathetic excision. Prompted by Juno’s unprecedented command, Morpheus enters Ceyx’s dead body, conveys it to Alcyone and, adopting the voice of the zombified King, tells her for ‘certes’ that he is dead, that she should bury his body, and that she should ‘let be [her] sorwful lyf’. He finally offers the lamentable aphorism, ‘To lytel whyle oure blysse lasteth’ (202, 204, 211): With that hir eyen up she casteth And saw noght. “Allas!” quod she for sorwe, And deyede within the thridde morwe. But what she sayede more in that swow I may not telle yow as now; Hyt were to longe for to dwelle. (212–7) 7 8

The specifically vernacular associations of ‘romaunce’ are mentioned by Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), p. 23. Chaucer’s bricolage of sources is treated in James I. Wimsatt, ‘The Sources of Chaucer’s “Seys and Alcyone”’, Medium Ævum 36/3 (1967), 231–41; and A. J. Minnis with V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995), pp. 90–9.



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The narrator seems to have translated Ceyx’s aphorism into metafictional terms while inverting its object: whereas Ceyx and Alcyone had too little time for joy, the Chaucerian narrator has precious little time for sorrow. Like Machaut, for whom the story is also inset within a larger frame and is there told by an amorous knight, the Chaucerian narrator excises Alcyone’s passionate complaint, including her plan for a grave and her epitaphic touch with Ceyx. But, unlike Machaut’s knight, he also omits the joyful sequel in which Alcyone rejoins Ceyx through their avian metamorphoses.9 The phonic connection between lines 213 and 214 condenses Chaucer’s distance from the Ovidian tradition into a rhyme. For Ovid, the ‘morwe’ after ‘sorwe’ brings a blissful reunion; but, for Chaucer, the morning brings only Alcyone’s death. The newly catastrophic ending, eliminating a metamorphosis habitually subjected to Christian allegorization, has elicited substantial commentary, diverse critics diversely deeming it a signal of the narrator’s narcissism and interpretive limitations, an indication of Chaucer’s proto-modern secular humanism, or a manifestation of his English literalism and its resistance to theoretical French figuration.10 These assessments may all be correct, but they are at least partially limited by their comparative methodology, discussing Metamorphoses XI and its subsequent redactions, but not the poem that I have argued lies behind it: the Heroides. Chaucer links Alcyone with Ovid’s heroines when, in the metafictional introduction to his tale, the Man of Law remembers a ‘Chaucer’ who has churned out more love-complaints ‘than Ovide made of mencioun / In his Episteles’ (CT II, 54–5), and then cites Alcyone as the first example to prove the point. Here, Alcyone heads a catalogue of epistolary women like Dido, Phyllis, and Ariadne from the ‘Seintes Legende of Cupide’ (II, 61), a retroactive association already well supported by the abrupt ending of her story in the Duchess. ‘But what she sayede more in that swow / I may not telle yow as now; / Hyt were to longe for to dwelle’ (BD 215–17), the Chaucerian narrator flatly declares, anticipating with Alcyone the form of curt dismissal afforded to a plaintive woman like Phyllis in her Heroides-inspired legend: ‘But al hire letter wryten I ne may /

9

10

For the Ceyx and Alcyone story in Machaut’s La Fonteinne Amoureuse, see The Fountain of Love (La Fonteinne amoureuse) and Two Other Love Vision Poems, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1993), lines 539–698. The most thorough comparison of Machaut’s Alcyone-story with Chaucer’s is Edwards, The Dream of Chaucer, pp. 74–82. See, respectively, Richard Rambuss, ‘“Processe of Tyme”: History, Consolation and Apocalypse in the Book of the Duchess’, Exemplaria 2/2 (1990), 659–83 (at p. 671); Helen Cooper, ‘Chaucer and Ovid: A Question of Authority’, in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 71–81 (at pp. 74–7); and Williams, French Fetish, pp. 24–7. The Christian tradition of allegorizing Ovid is importantly covered by Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, 1986), pp. 94–136; and regarding Chaucer, by Akbari, ‘Ovid and Ovidianism’, pp. 193–4.

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By order, for it were to me a charge; / Hire letter was ryght long and therto large’ (LGW 2513–5). With this alignment Chaucer draws out what was implicit for Ovid, who had in Metamorphoses XI already constructed Alcyone in comparison with his earlier heroines. Separated from her love, complaining about her loss, yearning for death, envisioning her tomb, Alcyone there threatens to become another member in a recursive pattern of suffering most obviously exemplified by Dido and Phyllis. Whereas Ovid in Metamorphoses XI finally transcends the Heroides, going beyond its pattern by granting Alcyone her avian transformation, Chaucer reverses the triumphant process, and reads backward through the Ovidian corpus. Isolated, distraught, and perhaps even committing suicide, Chaucer’s Alcyone reiterates the model of the Heroides rather than moving past it.11 In this respect, what we normally call Chaucer’s omission of the Ovidian metamorphosis might equally be called his recursus to an earlier Ovidian fons, pushing Alcyone back toward the source – the Heroides – from which she had formerly emerged. The return brings its own omissions. Chaucer also treats Alcyone like the Ovidian heroines as they will be reimagined in his Legend, cutting them off before they have given full voice to their complaints, and injecting a different voice in their stead. In place of Alcyone’s sorrow in the Duchess, the narrator explains: My first matere I wil yow telle, Wherfore I have told this thyng Of Alcione and Seys the kyng, For thus moche dar I saye wel: I had be dolven everydel And ded, right thurgh defaute of slep, Yif I ne had red and take kep Of this tale next before. (BD 218–25)

The common Middle English collocation between ‘ded’ and ‘dolven’ (buried) here assumes an uncommon significance, refiguring several rejected ideas from the Ovidian material that precedes it. With grammatical legerdemain the Chaucerian narrator shifts Ceyx’s declarative and imperative statements into the conditional mood. Where the Thracian King informs Alcyone of his death and instructs her to bury his body, the narrator proposes a similar fate for himself only to belie it with a subsequent conjunction: ‘I had be dolven everydel / And ded … / Yif I ne had red and take kep / of this tale.’ Into his conditional construction, the narrator condenses traces from the two endings of Ovid’s original story, in which Alcyone first envisions her own death and burial before gaining a reprieve in her metamorphosis. The 11

For Alcyone’s apparent suicide, see Judith Ferster, ‘Intention and Interpretation in the Book of the Duchess’, Criticism 22/1 (1980), 1–24 (at pp. 5–6).



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Chaucerian narrator replays the sequence in a single sentence, predicting the potentially fatal consequences of his insomnia, and then cancelling them with help from his fortunate reading experience. What happened to Alcyone in Ovid, avoiding a seemingly unavoidable death, now happens to Chaucer’s narrator through her story. Chaucer supports the association between Alcyone and his narrator by generating various additional points of contact between them.12 When the narrator cuts off Alcyone’s complaint, he recapitulates a practice that he has already applied to himself. Just as he turns away from Alcyone and her sorrow because ‘my first matere I wil yow telle’, he similarly abridges his own distressful story about the eight-year sickness, insisting that ‘our first mater is good to kepe’ (43). Along with his abridged complaint, the narrator shares with Alcyone, however much in jest, her pragmatic discipleship to Juno. Alcyone pledges a sacrifice to the goddess in return for a dream confirming Ceyx’s fate, and having read about it, the narrator follows her lead. He receives the first matter of his dream only after he has likewise prayed to ‘Morpheus / Or hys goddesse, dame Juno’ (242–3) for sleep, and has similarly promised her a gift so ‘that she shal holde hir payd’ (269). Fittingly, when the narrator falls asleep, his prostrate body lands ‘ryght upon’ his Ovidian ‘book’ (274). Already sharing several characteristics with Alcyone, he now shares with her a physical location, literally inserted among the pages of her story. The narrator’s subsequent dream extends the network of connections in the person of the Black Knight. While he represents John of Gaunt on the level of historical allegory, bewailing the death of his beloved Blanche, the Knight also seems a projection of the narrator’s distressed condition and a mirror image of Alcyone’s sorrowful state. Whereas Alcyone faces the sudden and tragic death of her husband, the despairing Knight bewails the premature death of his wife.13 But the Knight adds an extra component to the pattern of suffering since he is afforded the opportunity to do precisely what Alcyone and the narrator were not: give full and unabridged voice to a grievous complaint. Near the start of his dream, the narrator follows a single ‘whelp’ into a grove lush with flowers and trees where he sees the solitary Knight sitting under an oak. Without being observed, the narrator approaches the handsome youth and hears him speak ‘a rym’ of ‘compleynte to himselve’

12

13

Further connections between Alcyone and the narrator are addressed by Michael D. Cherniss, ‘The Narrator Asleep and Awake in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Papers on Language and Literature 8 (1972), 115–26 (at pp. 117–18); Rambuss, ‘“Processe of tyme”’, p. 671; and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, CA, 1992), p. 64. These relationships are discussed by Helen Phillips, ‘Structure and Consolation in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 16/2 (1981), 107–18 (at p. 109), who suggests that the individual stories ‘are all so shaped and molded in the telling that they present the same pattern, the same shape of experience, to the reader’.

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(463–4). ‘Ful wel I kan / Reherse hyt’, the previously economical narrator reports: ‘I have of sorwe so gret won That joye gete I never non, Now that I see my lady bryght, Which I have loved with al my myght, Is fro me ded and ys agoon.    ‘Allas, deth, what ayleth the, That thou noldest have taken me, Whan thou toke my lady swete, That was so fair, so fresh, so fre, So good that men may wel se Of al goodnesse she had no mete!’

(473–86)

At the opening of his poem’s second stanza, the Knight goes beyond the point at which Alcyone had been earlier cut off. Where she was allowed only a fitful and terminal ‘alas’, he now uses the same exclamation to propel six more lines of verse: ‘Allas, deth, what ayleth the …’. The lines, though probably not held up as a model of excellent poetry, are nevertheless rich in rhetorical schemes and phonic effects. The Knight addresses death with an apostrophe and a rhetorical question; develops it through the polyptotonic doubling of ‘taken’ and ‘toke’ and ‘good’ and ‘goodnesse’ as well as the anaphoric, parallel, and asyndetonic sequence of ‘so fair, so fresh, so fre, / So good’; then finally couples his repeated intensifier with an internal rhyme on ‘no’. The stylistic fertility of the lines signals a new connection between grief and its expression, loss, sorrow, and death here leading not to the external imposition of silence but to the creative production of ornamental, memorial art. The rest of the dream is driven by a similarly memorializing impulse. After the Knight finishes his formal complaint, the narrator continues to eschew his waking concern with verbal economy, drawing the sorrowful youth into a lengthy conversation about the past, encouraging him to fully unfold the causes of his woe. As Phillipa Hardman has persuasively demonstrated, the poeticized conversation resembles several contemporary modes of cultural production, which had likewise tried to aestheticize Blanche’s short life and John’s grief over her death. Chief among them is the elaborately ornamented tomb, complete with ‘life-sized portrait effigies’, that John commissioned for himself and his wife shortly after her death in 1369, and that Henry Yevele constructed in 1374. Adorning Old St Paul’s cathedral until its destruction in London’s 1666 Great Fire, the tomb memorializes life and loss through its ‘idealized portrait image’ of Blanche, which remembers her as the paragon of feminine beauty, and its ‘canopied arcading’ and accompanying ‘niches’, which create a space for mourners to express their grief. The effects are analogously achieved in the Duchess by the Knight’s stylized and nearly iconic



Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid  107

representation of the fair White, and his pitiful effort to solidify himself into the living ‘image of sorrow’.14 The analogy runs even deeper. In a passage that Hardman doesn’t discuss, the Knight describes the years of his carefree and idle youth with this striking simile, the vehicle for which fuses at least two modes of artistic production: Paraunter I was therto most able, As a whit wal or a table, For hit ys redy to cacche and take Al that men wil theryn make, Whethir so men wil portreye or peynte, Be the werkes never so queynte.

(779–84)

Familiar from Aristotle and the Stoics through Ockham and Aquinas, and likely derived directly here from Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, the connection between human cognition and a blank slate ready for inscription may accrete some new meanings in the context of Chaucer’s Duchess.15 The poem’s aim at a sort of funerary monumentalization helps activate a denotation of ‘table’ in which the word signifies the part of a tomb that bears a written message. In the fourth book of the Confessio Amantis, Gower’s Genius recounts the story of Iphis and his unrequited love for Araxarathen, explaining that, after his untimely death, survivors monumentalized the passionate youth in an ‘epitaphe’, the ‘letters graven in a table / Of marbre were and seiden this: “Hier lith, which slowh himself, Iphis, / For love of Araxarathen”’.16 Araxarathen herself, who pitilessly rejected his affection, has already been metamorphosed into a fittingly flinty stone, a material form she now shares with Iphis on the stone table of his tomb. In his simile, the Black Knight pairs the ‘table’, a surface able to accept a similarly inscribed epitaph, with a second surface that invites the inscription of poetry. The 14

15

16

Phillipa Hardman, ‘The Book of the Duchess as a Memorial Monument’, ChR 28/3 (1994), 205–15. For the purpose of this essay, I accept Hardman’s dating of BD’s completion to c. 1374–76; the late date, as Hardman observes, does not preclude the possibility that Chaucer started writing the poem considerably earlier. More recently, on Blanche’s grave, see Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Place of the Bedchamber in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, SAC 37 (2015), 133–61 (at pp. 153–7). See also Boffey and Edwards, in this volume, on the problem of dating. Cf. Remede de Fortune, in Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, ed. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens, GA, 1988), lines 26–34. The connection with Chaucer is identified in Robert R. Edwards, ‘Faithful Translations: Love and the Question of Poetry in Chaucer’, in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany, NY, 1991), pp. 138–53 (at pp. 142–3), which also cites the classical precedents. Ockham and Aquinas are treated in Kathryn L. Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 52–4; see also Wells, in this volume. Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, 2006), vol. 2, p. 262, 4.3672–5. See also MED s.v. ‘table’ (n.), 1(b).

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painted ‘wal’ evokes the opening episode of the narrator’s dream in which he finds himself in a dazzling chamber where ‘alle the walles with colours fyne / Were peynted, bothe text and glose, / Of al the Romaunce of the Rose’ (BD 332–4), a textualized space where the wall is designed to ‘cacche and take’ the record of a literary tradition and its reception history. The collocation of ‘wal’ and ‘table’ reappears soon after in Chaucer’s corpus, and there similarly aligns the representation of poetry with the engraving of a tomb. Near the start of the House of Fame, Geffrey dreams that he has entered a temple of glass, in which he sees the opening lines of Virgil’s epic Aeneid inscribed and translated into more modest English: ‘I fond that on a wall ther was / Thus writen on a table of bras: / “I wol now synge, if I kan, / The armes and also the man”’ (HF 141–4). With his ekphrasis of the Troy story, Chaucer rewrites his earlier Duchess, which presented Benoît’s version of the Trojan matter on stained glass windows, as well as Dante’s Purgatorio and the comparable ekphrasis in its twelfth canto.17 There, sculpted into a roadway, the pilgrim beholds ‘Troy in ashes and in caverns’ (‘Troia in cenere e in caverne’) (Prg. 12.61), a painful image that to him resembles ‘le tombe’ set above the dead, ‘in order that there be memory of them’ (‘perché di lor memoria sia’) (Prg. 12.16–17).18 Building on his Dantean precedent, Chaucer in the House of Fame makes the inscription of a poetic Trojan past also bear the epitaph of its demise: ‘First sawgh I the destruction / Of Troye’ (HF 151–2). This linguistic evidence, attesting the potential meanings for an inscribed ‘wal or table’, suggests that the Knight’s simile works on two levels of comparison. In a rhetorical capacity, it may align the Knight’s cognitive development with a process of indiscriminate inscription, and thus perhaps with a juvenile intellection which carelessly receives all sense impressions as ‘ylyche good’ (BD 803).19 But, on a metafictional level, the simile enables a comparison between the art forms its vehicle evokes, between poetic inscription and epitaphic inscription. In other words, the vehicle of his simile may itself present the artistic analogy that connects the Duchess to its historical context. Like the ‘wal or table’ and the twin forms of poetic and epitaphic writing they can receive, the Duchess links two types of memorial work, producing the monumental poem for White and her husband as an analogy to the monumental tomb for Blanche and John. The various forms of memorial representation, moreover, link the Knight and his dead love to the literary–historical precedent outlined in the narrator’s 17

18 19

Benoît’s probable relevance for BD is detailed by Colin Wilcockson, ‘Explanatory Notes’, in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 969. On the connection between HF and Dante’s ekphrasis, see Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy (Stanford, CA, 1989), pp. 23–6. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 120–5. Edwards, ‘Faithful Translations’, p. 143; Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions, pp. 53–4.



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reading material. As I have argued, the story of Ceyx and Alcyone from Metamorphoses XI offers two endings, respectively represented by Alcyone’s predicative inscription on her grave and by her triumphant transformation into a bird. Chaucer removes both of these when recounting the story itself, but in the subsequent dream he may recall the first Ovidian ending and draw ideas from it. In the Knight’s recollection of his early years, Chaucer suggests an internal locus for Alcyone’s formerly external inscription. Epitaphic writing, once imagined by the sorrowful Queen as an inscription on her literal tomb, is now part of a figurative inscription on the Knight’s self. Befitting the new context, Chaucer resignifies diction from Ovid’s initial conclusion, assigning a freshly metonymic meaning to his key word ‘littera’. No longer the plaintive epistle of a deserted woman or the written signs on a grave, the ‘littera’ here denotes the knowledge impressed on the table of the Knight’s youthful mind: his ‘letre’ is ‘love’, a ‘craft’ that he diligently cultivates for the rest of his life (BD 788–91). The shapes of alphabetic characters have become the shaping of human character. Chaucer further reinvents the first Ovidian ending when he aligns the Duchess with analogous forms of funerary art. Like Alcyone imagining her own death, the Duchess links two separated lovers through a monument instead of a metamorphosis. The tomb on which Alcyone can touch Ceyx, name with name, becomes in Chaucer the tomb-like poem commemorating Blanche’s death and John’s grief. What the Duchess had once simply omitted is now refigured: if Chaucer initially cuts out the first conclusion from Metamorphoses XI, he implicitly redistributes its commitment to inscription and monumentality in the latter half of his poem. Spenser goes beyond his English predecessor, as we will see, by reimagining Alcyone’s grave in more explicit fashion, though with equally metafictional intentions. In Daphnaïda, her namesake’s tomb provides the surface on which a rewriting of Chaucer may be inscribed.

II: Literary Genealogy and Transhistorical Touch Spenser’s Daphnaïda is an imitative repetition of, and an inventive response to, Chaucer’s Duchess, presenting another instance of grief and loss, while arranging it within a new structure and system of character development. Spenser fuses the waking and dreaming frames of his predecessor’s poem, naming his bereaved male complainant after the female protagonist in Chaucer’s reading material, and assigning him a lament that recycles phrases from the Black Knight. Formerly two figures connected by their similarly sorrowful situations, Alcyone and the Man in Black now comprise a single, composite character: Alcyon, a shepherd whose vocation links him to the pastoral community of Spenser’s 1579 Shepheardes Calender, and whose suffering identifies him as the allegorical representation of the Elizabethan

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courtier and widower Sir Arthur Gorges.20 Like Chaucer’s Black Knight, Spenser’s Alcyon mourns the death of his wife, Daphne, sobriquet for Lady Douglas Howard, in a highly stylized complaint, which for him unfolds in seven demarcated sections, the first six of which recur to the refrain ‘Weepe Shepheard weepe to make my vndersong’ (Daph. 245, 294, 343, 392, 441, 490).21 Like Alcyone, Spenser’s distraught shepherd focalizes a meditation about endings, which is now pursued in the complaint’s seventh section when the refrain assumes a newly terminal form: ‘Cease Shepheard, cease, and end thy vndersong’ (539). Spenser crafts Alcyon’s final words by reaching beyond Chaucer to his classical precedent in Ovid. Like his namesake in Metamorphoses XI, Spenser’s Alcyon similarly stops his complaint by envisioning his own death, imagining his grave, and contemplating the writing inscribed on it. The ending makes explicit in Spenser what was implicit and displaced in his predecessors. Whereas Chaucer excised the Ovidian grave and only registered its concern with monumentality elsewhere and indirectly, Spenser remakes it into the culminating and conspicuously prominent emblem of his poem. Whereas Ovid had finally transcended Alcyone’s monument with her metamorphosis, Spenser reinstates the former and seemingly premature conclusion as a significant end in itself. Signaling both his debt to and difference from his models, Spenser evokes Alcyone not primarily to imply the consoling optimism of her second ending, as Donald Cheney suggests, but to recuperate the unrealized creative possibilities of the tomb that preceded it.22 The potential lies in Ovid’s suggestion that epitaphic writing has the capacity for touch: ‘nomen nomine tangam.’ Having cursed the transitory state of worldly life, Spenser’s Alcyon caps his lament with appeals to a variety of groups, which he addresses in six anaphorically structured stanzas (‘and ye … and ye’), the last of which entreats: ye poore Pilgrimes, that with restlesse toyle Wearie your selues in wandring desert wayes, Till that you come, where ye your vowes assoyle, When passing by ye read these wofull layes

20

21 22

For Gorges as Alcyon, see Helen Estabrook Sandison, ‘Arthur Gorges, Spenser’s Alcyon and Ralegh’s Friend’, PMLA 43 (1928), 645–74. The similarities and differences between BD and Daph are summarized in Duncan Harris and Nancy L. Steffen, ‘The Other Side of the Garden: An Interpretive Comparison of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Spenser’s Daphnaïda’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978), 17–36. All citations of Spenser are from The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London, 1999). Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Fortieth Birthday and Other Related Fictions’, Spenser Studies 4 (1983), 3–31, and ‘Grief and Creativity in Spenser’s Daphnaïda’, in Grief and Gender, 700–1600, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught and Lynne Dickson Brucker (New York, 2003), pp. 123–31.



Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid  111 On my graue written, rue my Daphnes wrong, And mourne for me that languish out my dayes: Cease Shepheard, cease, and end thy vndersong.

(Daph. 533–9)

For his grave and its epitaph, Alcyon imagines readers who are future versions of himself: like his intended audience, Alcyon too is a pilgrim, wandering restlessly on his pilgrimage, worshipping his saint, Daphne, and delivering prayers in her honour. The religiously inflected terms with which Alcyon associates his readership have a pertinent connection to the sense of touch. Traditionally, at least before the Reformation, an English pilgrim would visit a gravesite with the probable intention of venerating a saintly shrine and its accompanying relics, often practicing a ‘tactile piety’ that made physical contact with a manifestation of the divine on earth.23 Like the practitioners of that devotion, their detractors and opponents were attuned to the relationship between pilgrimage and touch. When Henry VIII officially abolished pilgrim shrines, the reformist King was explicitly targeting tactile piety and the idolatry it ostensibly enabled. In his Second Royal Injunctions of 1538, the King simultaneously condemned ‘wandering to pilgrimage’ and the ‘kissing and licking’ of all relics as ‘great threats and maledictions’ against God. Under the new dispensation of Henrician reform, tactile piety could persist only by shifting its register away from the literal and toward the metaphoric, from touching in deed to touching ‘as it were’.24 In the final stanza of Alcyon’s complaint, Spenser recalls the legacy of this religious discourse to rewrite it through an Ovidian lens. The sorrowful shepherd imagines a group of pilgrims passing by his burial site, yet he ties the process to a different form of touch, one that no longer involves an overt piety, but that, in keeping with a post-Reformation spirit, is properly metaphoric. The touch takes place not through the devout pilgrims around the grave but, as its Ovidian precedent suggests, in the writing on it. The contiguous lettering on an inscribed tomb, once linking the classical Alcyone to her husband, now links the lines of Alcyon’s woeful lays: the touch between two names becomes the touch, as it were, between many plaintive words. The forty-nine stanzas of Alcyon’s epitaph are constructed through a

23 24

The phrase ‘tactile piety’ is from Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2000), pp. 118–20. For Henry targeting tactile piety, see Margaret Aston, ‘Public Worship and Iconoclasm’, in The Archaeology of Reformation, 1480–1580, ed. David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (Leeds, 2003), pp. 9–28. The 1538 legislation may be found in Walter Howard Frere and William McClure Kennedy, eds, Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, 3 vols (London, 1910), vol. 2, p. 37. For the post-Reformation retention of tactile piety, and the figurative terms (‘as it were’) through which it was articulated, see Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford, 2014), pp. 30–45.

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poetics of imitation, collectively attesting his connection with several equally sorrowful and loquacious figures from the literary past. When Alcyon praises the pureness and fairness of his lost beloved, when he commends her facility in singing and dancing, when he claims never to have worried about worldly chance in his youth, when he complains that he is dying on a daily basis and consuming himself in pain, his words echo Chaucer’s Duchess and the laments there voiced by the Black Knight. Or when Alcyon vows to dwell in the solitary shade, to spend the night in plaints and the day in woe, to take partnership with the sorrowful nightingale, and to welcome the misery-augmenting cries of his fellow mourners, his words recall Spenser’s own August eclogue in the Shepheardes Calender (SC) and the sestina that Colin composed and Cuddie recited.25 Alcyon shares with his plaintive predecessors a common, literary identity. The Black Knight is a poet, fashioning an amorous ‘song’ for the young White as well as a ‘rym’ of ‘ten vers or twelve’ upon her death (BD 463). Cuddie and Colin are versifiers, the former outlining the ‘perfecte paterne of a Poete’ (SC Oct. Arg. 170), the latter providing the person under whom ‘the Authour selfe is shadowed’ (SC Epis. 133–4). Alcyon has a similar status, turning ‘Sweet layes of loue to endlesse plaints of pittie’ in the catalogue of court writers from Colin Clovts Come Home Againe (CCCHA 387), and offering Arthur Gorges the pastoral persona for his manuscript poetry.26 Comprised of complaints shared by several poets, the epitaph imagined for Alcyon’s grave has an overtly metafictional valence: it’s a monument in a poem but also a monument of poetry. The grave commemorates the past of Alcyon’s life as well as the past of literary history, bearing a surface stratified by various layers of time. Here lie Alcyon’s original verses from 1591, placed alongside vestiges of the verses produced in Chaucer’s distant past of the 1370s and in Spenser’s recent past of 1579. So monumentalized, the poems form a relationship of spatial proximity through which they, following the Ovidian logic, have the capacity to touch. This sounds, certainly, like an au courant way of thinking about literary history, especially after George Edmondson’s study of poetic neighbourhoods and their contiguous connections, as well as Carolyn Dinshaw’s work in affective historiography and its touch across time.27 But it’s also an old way of thinking about literary history and one for which Spenser provides the emblem. Establishing a transhistor-

25

26 27

For the echoes of BD and ‘August’ in Daphnaïda, see, respectively, Thomas William Nadal, ‘Spenser’s Daphnaïda and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, PMLA 23 (1908), 646–61; and David Lee Miller, ‘Laughing at Spenser’s Daphnaïda’, Spenser Studies 26 (2011), 241–50 (at p. 243). Gorges’ manuscript poetry is examined by Jonathan Gibson, ‘The Legal Context of Spenser’s Daphnaïda’, RES 55/218 (2004), 22–44 (at p. 31). Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame, IN, 2011); Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham, NC, 1999).



Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid  113

ical bond in which the poetry of the past is contiguous with the poetry of the present, Spenser imagines Alcyon’s grave. The tactile connection is significant insofar as it presents an alternative to the more conventional method of ordering history envisioned elsewhere in the poem: up to this point in Daphnaïda, the predominant way of linking past, present, and future has been genealogical succession. Daphne articulates that genealogical principle in her dying request, which Alcyon tearfully reports at the end of the second part of his complaint. Though ultimately imagined as part of his epitaph, her wishes are the thematic and structural counterpoint to it; where Alcyon’s final words project a tactile bond, Daphne’s last words voice the type of connection from which he deviates. Daphne will soon ascend to her heavenly residence. ‘Yet ere I go’, she entreats her husband: ‘a pledge I leaue with thee Of the late loue, the which betwixt vs past, My yong Ambrosia, in lieu of mee Loue her: so shall our loue for euer last. Thus deare adieu, whom I expect ere long:’ So hauing said, away she softly past: Weep Shepheard weep, to make mine vndersong. (Daph. 288–94)

The rime riche between the second and sixth lines coordinates death with historical time, the passing of Daphne’s life marking her love with Alcyon as a bond from the past. To sustain their connection, as Daphne advises, Alcyon should transfer his affection to their daughter, Ambrosia, who is alive in the present and who will, as the link between her name and immortality suggests, perpetuate their love long into the future.28 In progeny lies the power to project a relationship across history, connecting the past of Daphne’s love to the present through a line of genealogical descent. That line, of which Ambrosia is the present and future representative, equally extends to a more distant time, long prior to the life and death of her mother. Before making his blunt declaration that Daphne ‘now is dead’ (Daph. 184), Alcyon had, using what the narrator calls a ‘riddle’ (177), referred to his lost love as a ‘faire young Lionesse’ born ‘an auncient Lions haire’ (107, 122). The poem’s narrator is confused by the symbolic terminology, but its readers are not. Guided by the title-page, we recognize Alcyon’s dead beloved as a descendant of the Howard family for which the Lion provided the longstanding armorial sign.29 Spenser constructs the riddling reference against his Chaucerian precedent. The Black Knight in the Duchess had similarly puzzled the narrator by describing his loss in equally metaphoric language, calling his White a beloved ‘fers’ checked by the malevolent Fortune (BD 655–60). By 28 29

The link between Ambrosia and immortality is addressed in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, gen. ed. William A. Oram (New Haven, CT, 1989), p. 505. W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), p. 149.

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changing the vehicle of the metaphor, Spenser places new emphasis on the logic of lineal descent, substituting the Chaucerian terminology of chess with the genealogical discourse of familial inheritance. This connects Daphne and her daughter, the poetic representations of Douglas Howard and Ambrosia Gorges, in a family tree of Lions, stretching through their immediate predecessor, Henry, second Viscount Bindon, back into the Middle Ages. In alluding to the distant past, Spenser assigns a special role to Henry’s great-great-aunt, Anne Howard, whom he makes a focal point of his dedicatory epistle; there, the female progenitor links the Howard clan with the poem’s other important family. Writing to the Marchioness of Northampton, the poem’s dedicatee, Spenser explains that he undertook his work both because of the esteemed reputation of the deceased Douglas and because of the goodwill he feels for her husband: ‘Master Arthure Gorges … whose house … your Ladiship by mariage hath honoured, so doo I finde the name of them by many notable records, to be of great antiquitie in this Realme’ (Daph. Epis. 7–10). To ‘honour’ the noble family, the Marchioness married Thomas Gorges, Arthur’s uncle and a man whose genealogy overlaps with that of his nephew’s dead wife. About the Gorges family, Spenser writes: ‘so linially are they descended from the Howards, as that the Lady Anne Howard … was wife to Sir Edmund, mother to Sir Edward, and grandmother to Sir William and Sir Thomas Gorges Knights’ (Daph. Epis. 492).30 Viewed in relation to the interlocked pedigree, the recent union between Arthur and Douglas, Alcyon and Daphne, becomes the reunion of the two ancient houses: Gorges and Howard, families once linked in the marriage of Edmund and Anne. As the product of the Howard/Gorges reunion, Ambrosia is even more important than Daphne’s dying wishes would overtly suggest. She represents a genealogical continuity that connects Daphne to Alcyon as well as an entire network of Renaissance families to their medieval forefathers. In the seventh and culminating section of his complaint, however, Alcyon turns away from Ambrosia and the hereditary power invested in her. He leaves his daughter conspicuously absent from his summative roll call of the pastoral community, those shepherds and damsels who will survive after his death, deck his ‘hearse … with Cyparesse’ (Daph. 528–9), and lament for Daphne in posterity. In place of his lineal descendant, Alcyone imagines a grave, preferring that monumental means to project his past into the future. He disregards the promise of progeny and seeks, instead, to preserve his love with Daphne in an epitaph, supplanting in the process his familial ties with his bond to various readers and writers: the future pilgrims who will mirror his identity and mourn around his grave, as well as the past poets whose verses are inscribed on it. Forgetful of his fatherhood, Alcyon undercuts his

30

A cogent summary of the genealogies is available in Gibson, ‘Legal Context’, pp. 43–4.



Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid  115

genealogical succession with, on one hand, his affective connection to the future and, on the other, his tactile connection to the past. As Raphael Falco has persuasively demonstrated, sixteenth-century authors often analogize familial with poetic history: ‘the sociological impulse to establish a pedigree … bears an important relation to the need among Elizabethan writers to justify their literary practices. Just as courtiers strove to establish the ancient roots of their line, poets in the period began to put together a literary family tree.’31 With Alcyon, Spenser acknowledges the analogy and advances a negative corollary to it: just as he discounts his biological genealogy, Alcyon looks beyond the logic of literary genealogy. In England’s poetic family tree, as represented by authors from Hoccleve in 1415 to Greene in 1590, Chaucer holds the paternal position. He is the ‘maistir deere and fadir reverent’, the ‘universel fadir in science’, ‘fader Chaucer, maister galfryde’, the ‘fader and founder of ornate eloquence’, ‘the father of our English poets’, ‘our Father’, ‘ould Father Chaucer’.32 The tradition of paternal appellation reaches its apotheosis in the 1700 Fables Ancient and Modern, in which Dryden, arguing that poets share ‘lineal descents and clans as well as other families’, casts Chaucer as the ‘Father of English Poetry’, and places him in a distinguished genealogy leading to Spenser and Milton.33 In Daphnaïda, Spenser too situates literary history alongside a genealogical framework, charting what he calls the lineal descents of the Howard and Gorges clan before imitating ‘the Father of our English poets’ and his Duchess. Where the preface identifies the medieval forefathers for Arthur Gorges, the poem implies a medieval forefather for Spenser. As I have argued, though, Spenser also advances an alternative to the conventionally paternalistic terminology, using Alcyon to displace a genealogical stemma with a grave. Spenser’s final, culminating monument privileges not the relationship between a parent and child but the bond among various nearby verses. Accordingly, Spenser’s connection with Chaucer here relies less on a line of familial descent than on a space where the traces of their past poetry can metaphorically touch. The epitaph turns the vertical

31 32

33

Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, MA, 1994), p. 6. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), lines 1961, 1964; Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS ES 3 (London, 1868), lines 335, 330; George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY, 2007), pp. 106–7; George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, ed. G. W. Pigman III (Oxford, 2000), pp. 456–7; Robert Greene, The Cobler of Caunterburie (London, 1590), STC 4579, fol.K1v. On the ubiquity of the genealogical metaphor, see A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985): ‘the fatherhood of Chaucer was in effect the constituent idea of the English poetic tradition’ (p. 95). The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, 20 vols (Berkeley, 1956–2000), vol. 7, pp. 25, 33.

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relation between father Chaucer and child Spenser into the inconsistently arranged proximity of Chaucerian and Spenserian poetry, where vestiges of each are variously above, below, or next to each other based on their place in the memorial inscription. ‘Perhaps no ideology’, writes Ethan Knapp, ‘is so central to the institution of literary history as that of filial piety … It is, indeed, hard to imagine a form of literary history that would not be genealogical’.34 Daphnaïda imagines literary history otherwise: on its projected grave, poets and poems typically linked by consanguinity are now linked by contiguity. Why does that matter for Spenser and Chaucer? Their contiguous connection forms a poetic tradition wherein uninterrupted influence and imitation comprise only one component. True, Daphnaïda is stimulated by several specific sources, drawing directly on the Duchess and the August eclogue, but its combination of these precedents, arranged alongside each other on the grave, presents a different kind of intertextual case. Though they both feature complaints, ‘August’ never alludes to Chaucer’s Duchess and, in the Calender itself, Colin’s sestina seems deliberately divorced from a line of direct influence, Chaucerian or otherwise. Whereas E. K. takes pride elsewhere to identify literary connections, the normally prolix expositor here falls silent, leaving all 38 lines of the sestina without a single gloss. Perhaps the lines were late additions to the Calender’s collection and E. K. did not have time to fully explain them, but whatever the reason, his conspicuous silence still shapes the eclogue’s reception.35 Distanced from its potentially recognizable sources – say, the fourth eclogue of Sannazaro’s Arcadia – the sestina of ‘Colins own making’ highlights its principle of internal generation rather than its literary–historical precedents, building each new line by recycling one of its own preceding words: ‘woe’, ‘resound’, ‘cryes’, ‘part’, ‘sleepe’, ‘augment’. When Alcyon incorporates elements of it into his projected epitaph, the sestina gains a new literary attachment, standing near the incorporated verses from the Duchess. The inscribed monument now places, for instance, Colin’s former vow to ‘wake and sorrow all the night / With Philumene, my fortune to deplore’ (Daph. 474–5) alongside the Black Knight’s former complaint that he ‘daylie die[s] / And pine[s] away in selfe-consuming paine’ (Daph. 435–6). Their spatial arrangement on the grave connects the poems, even when a line of direct influence doesn’t obtain between them. Though not an imitation of the Duchess, the ‘August’ sestina still metaphorically touches it; while not tied in a sequence of cause and effect, the Duchess and ‘August’ are linked in history. 34 35

Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, PA, 2001), p. 107. For the sestina as a late addition, see Ruth Samson Laborsky, ‘The Illustrations of the Shepheardes Calender’, Spenser Studies 2 (1981), 3–53 (at p. 41).



Inscription and Intertextuality in Chaucer, Spenser, and Ovid  117

The indirect connection between the plaintive poems responds to a fantasy central in Spenser’s oeuvre, articulated with special force in his June eclogue. Colin, Spenser’s persona, there wishes for an intimate connection with the shepherd Tityrus, by whom ‘is meant Chaucer’, aspiring to receive plaintive power directly from the Chaucerian fons, and in turn, to send an inspired complaint straight to his faithless lass, Rosalind: ‘But if on me some little drops would flowe, / Of that the spring was in his learned hedde … / Then should my plaints … / Flye to my loue’ (SC Jun. 93–9). When his hopes are disappointed, Colin enlists help from the members of his community, asking them to ‘Beare witnesse’ to Rosalind’s unfaithfulness and report on his behalf the distress she caused him (SC Jun. 106–12), a task that Cuddie takes up when he recites Colin’s sestina in ‘August’. In Daphnaïda, Alcyon extends Cuddie’s chain of transmission by repurposing the sestina, echoing its sorrowful language to mourn a dead love rather than a faithless one. By juxtaposing parts of the sestina with parts of the Duchess, Alcyon similarly follows Cuddie’s lead and works on behalf of Colin, helping circumvent his professed limitations from ‘June’. Colin may not yet have received any drops straight from Chaucer’s learned head, but on the tomb, this doesn’t inhibit his connection to his poetic precursor. Colin’s sorrowful verses still join the tradition of Chaucerian complaint, standing next to the Duchess without needing influence from it, touching its lines without descending from them. The Duchess is the first major work by the father of English poetry, but for Colin and the author shadowed under him, its literary reach finally extends beyond a genealogical stemma onto the surface of Alcyon’s grave.

6 Tribute to a Duchess: The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune SARA STURM-MADDOX

Sometime after the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt, in 1368, Geoffrey Chaucer undertook to compose the poem that he called The Death of Blanche the Duchess, now generally known as the Book of the Duchess.1 As its original title suggests, the poem is topical: the recall in its opening section of the tragic Ovidian tale of Seys and Alcyone and the definitive closing pronouncement ‘She ys ded’ (1309) frame it with dramatic revelations of the death of a beloved spouse and the despairing grief of the bereaved partner. This response to the death of the wife of the most powerful prince of the realm has also been termed ‘the first clear instance of “courtly” literature in English’,2 a suggestion due in part to its borrowing from a substantial number of French poems. Here I examine the strong intertextual presence in the Duchess of the Remede de Fortune (after 1341, and before 1357), one of the major dits of Guillaume de Machaut, against the background of what Elizabeth Salter has aptly characterized as ‘the cosmopolitan years’ that followed the Battle of Poitiers in 1356,3 during which the ‘captivity’ of King John II of France and his sons intensified the already considerable prominence of French courtly poetry in England. That presence is particularly prominent in the longest segment of the Duchess, the story told by the Man in Black, which in its telling closely follows the account in the Remede of the origin, development, and effects of love for a highborn lady widely known for both her beauty and her virtue. The lady of the Remede, generally acknowledged to be John II’s first wife Bonne of Luxembourg, is identified by the narrator as ‘ma dame, qui est clamee / De tous sur toutes belle et bonne. / Chascun par droit ce non 1 2 3

On the history of the various titles accorded the poem in regard to its interpretation see Steve Ellis, ‘The Death of the “Book of the Duchess”’, ChR 29/3 (1995), 249–58. Jamie C. Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (Cardiff, 2015), p. 70. Elizabeth Salter, ‘Chaucer and Internationalism’, SAC 2 (1980), 71–9 (at p. 74).

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li donne’ (54–6) [my lady, who is proclaimed by all to be the most beautiful and best above all. Everyone rightly gives her this name]. This discreet but transparent anonymity enables the depiction of her beauty and goodness with an intimacy and candor that might well have appeared presumptuous in the poet’s own voice even within the courtly fiction in which he portrays her. Chaucer adopts Machaut’s punning strategy to conceal the lady of the Duchess with her identification by the man who loved her, a sorrowing man designated as the Man in Black: ‘And goode faire White she het; / That was my lady name ryght. / She was bothe fair and bryght; / She hadde not hir name wrong’ (BD 948–51).4 Chaucer, a 14-year-old of good family, probably entered the service of the Duchess of Ulster, the wife of King Edward III’s son Lionel, in 1357. Derek Pearsall, who lists the frequent travels of her household ‘chiefly to do the rounds of the estates and to keep royal feasts’ in that period, suggests that they perhaps included an excursion to see ‘the magnificent entry into London laid on in May 1357 for King John II of France, captured at Poitiers and arriving in England as the prisoner of Edward III’s son known as the Black Prince, riding towards Westminster on a great white horse, his captor riding at his side on a humble palfrey’.5 Young Chaucer could hardly have been unaware of the significance of the occasion, nor of the manner in which the ‘captivity’ of the French prisoners was played out in the company of captors to whom they were joined in varying degree by centuries-old ties of kinship and nobiliary custom. Both Edward III and John II hosted lavish feasts and ceremonial entertainments, and the French king freely pursued his interest in the acquisition of books and his patronage of poets and musicians.6 The composition and performance of love lyrics were among the favored diversions of these overlapping courtly circles, and their acknowledged master was Machaut, whose poems and songs circulated widely through working copies and oral performance in both France and England. After Poitiers, they could also be known through a splendidly illustrated codex of all of his compositions

4

5

6

The Remede de Fortune, both text and translation, is cited from Guillaume de Machaut, Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, ed. and trans. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens, GA, 1988). On Bonne as the lady of the Remede and Chaucer’s imitation of Machaut’s word play see Wimsatt and Kibler’s Introduction, pp. 33–7. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 39. Froissart offers these details in the Chroniques; see Richard Barber, ‘Jean Froissart and Edward the Black Prince’, in Froissart: Historian, ed. J. J. N. Palmer (Woodbridge, 1981), pp. 25–35 (at pp. 28–9). See Salter, ‘Chaucer and Internationalism’, pp. 74–5, and Nigel Wilkins, ‘Music and Poetry at Court: England and France in the Late Middle Ages’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 183–204 (at pp. 194–7).



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that preceded the king’s capture, Manuscript C (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 1586), dated on art-historical grounds to 1350–56.7 In 1359–60, as territorial conflict was renewed on the continent, Chaucer served briefly in France in Lionel’s company. He was captured and ransomed in 1360, and later that year was present in Calais at the ratification of the Treaty of Brétigny, carrying dispatches from Lionel between Calais and England.8 What Pearsall writes of as ‘the blank years of the biographical record’ for Chaucer, 1361–65,9 were the years of the residence in England of John II’s three younger sons, exchanged as hostages for their father according to the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny, which allowed him to return to France to seek funds for his ransom. Ardis Butterfield observes that, following the treaty, ‘the sudden release of tension seems to have encouraged a greater volume of traffic across the Channel, in both directions, showing how far conditions of war between the two countries were in a sense feeding off their mutual intimacy’,10 and the three French princes held their own splendid courts in England. We do have the suggestive record left by Chaucer’s near-contemporary, Jean Froissart from Hainault, who began service as a poet–courtier in the household of his compatriot, Edward III’s queen Philippa, in 1362. Years later, in the Chroniques, he wrote with enthusiasm of the diversions that the French nobility shared with their English ‘captors’. Among them the composition and performance of love-poetry apparently retained its prominence: he records fond memories of composing for Philippa ‘beaux dittiés et traittiés amoureux’ [fair poems and compositions treating of love],11 and John Gower, less approvingly, reports that in his youth ‘les fols ditz d’amours fesoie, / Dont en chantant je carolloie’ [I made foolish little lovesongs that I danced to while singing].12 Chaucer too, by his own admission, was composing love lyrics in the 1360s; in the Retraction to the Canterbury Tales he laments having written ‘many a song and many a leccherous lay, that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne’ (X, 1087). It is quite likely that some of the youthful poems to which he refers were in French.13 7

8 9 10

11

12 13

See François Avril, ‘Les Manuscrits enluminés de Guillaume de Machaut’, in Guillaume de Machaut: Colloque-table ronde organisé par l’Université de Reims, Actes et Colloques 23 (Paris, 1982), pp. 118–24. Pearsall, Life, p. 42. Ibid., p. 30. Ardis Butterfield, ‘French Culture and the Ricardian Court’, in Essays on Ricardian Liter­ ature in Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-­ Petre (Oxford, 1997), pp. 82–120 (at 92–3). See also Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), for probing discussions of this period. Froissart, Chroniques: Livre III (du Voyage en Béarn à la champagne de Gascoigne) et Livre IV (années 1389–1400), ed. Peter F. Ainsworth and Alberto Varvaro (Paris, 2004), p. 344; my translation. Gower, Mirour de l’Omne, 27340–1, my translation; cited in Pearsall, Life, p. 64. See James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of ‘Ch’ in University of Pennsylvania MS

122  Sara Sturm-Maddox

The poetry composed in French during these years also gave voice to the experience of separation and loss that was far from rare among them.14 The ballad ‘De ce que fols pense’ (What a fool thinks), singled out by Lawrence Earp as ‘the most widely transmitted work of the entire fourteenth century’, was composed by Pierre des Molins, a chaplain of John II who served him in exile during the years 1357–59, and bears the refrain ‘d’ainsi languir en estrange contree’ (thus to languish in a foreign country).15 The departure into England of Jean de Berry, one of John II’s sons exchanged for the king’s freedom in 1360, who was obliged to leave his recent bride in France, inspired a polyphonic lament by Machaut written in the female voice, ‘S’onques doulereusement’, known also as the ‘Lai de Confort’. Reaching England quickly, it inspired a similar expression of sympathy by Froissart, the lay ‘S’onques amoureusement’.16 Machaut also responded to Jean de Berry’s dilemma in one of his major dits, the Fonteinne amoureuse. In the respectful familiarity with which the narrator addresses a prince in this poem, many in the courtly public would have recognized a reflection of Machaut’s own familiarity with Jean de Berry acquired at the court of Jean’s mother Bonne of Luxembourg, the first wife of John II and one of Machaut’s major patrons; the prince’s name and that of the narrator are later concealed in an anagram for discovery. In January 1364 John II returned to England in the stead of Louis d’Anjou, one of his hostage sons who had violated the conditions of his captivity. Again he was magnificently received – Froissart composed a merry pastourelle celebrating the arrival of ‘the one who bears the fleurs de lys’ at the royal court at Eltham Palace17 – but died in London in April, possibly of a new outbreak of the plague. During another of these recurrent outbreaks, John of Gaunt’s wife Blanche died in September of 1368. As part of the household of the Countess of Ulster, Chaucer may have attended the wedding of Gaunt and Blanche at Reading in May 1359,18 and he had had ample occasion to observe the young couple within the circle of the court. The demise of a young and beautiful noblewoman was particularly affecting, and Blanche’s

14

15

16

17 18

French 15 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 1–8; Pearsall, Life, pp. 70–3. Butterfield observes that ‘a whole genre of writing arises in response to these conditions, with their subjects including the knight forced into exile, or the prisoner’ (‘French Culture’, p. 95). Lawrence Earp, ‘Cathedral and Court: Music under the Late Capetian and Valois Kings of France, to Louis XI’, in Cambridge Companion to French Music, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 21–48 (at p. 37); his translation. See Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘The Composer P. des Molins’, 3 January 2011, , accessed 30 January 2017. See Benjamin Albritton, ‘Translation and Parody: Responses to Machaut’s Lay de confort’, in Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yolanda Plumley, Stefano Jossa, and Giuliano di Bacco (Exeter, 2011), pp. 1–14. See Kristen Mossler Figg, The Short Lyric Poems of Jean Froissart: Fixed Forms and the Expression of the Courtly Ideal (New York, 1994), pp. 213–16. Pearsall, Life, pp. 35, 39.



The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune  123

death may well have recalled to Chaucer and many others that of the young duchess of Normandy called ‘belle et bonne’, portrayed at the center of her own courtly society in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, who had died of the plague only months before her husband became king of France.19 The dating of the composition of the Book of the Duchess remains a source of critical controversy, but J. J. N. Palmer has argued that Chaucer began its composition very shortly after Blanche’s death, and that it was probably completed and in circulation by November of that year.20 ‘From his first major poem’, John Fyler observes, ‘Chaucer – writing in English – signals his self-confident insertion of himself into the French poetic tradition.’21 As Ardis Butterfield points out, for this poem about death he might have chosen to follow the example of a few contemporary elegies written in French in honor of members of the English royal court, but the debt of the Duchess is instead largely to the tradition of French love poetry.22 We must assume that Chaucer felt no hesitation in identifying himself with that tradition, and more importantly that he was eager to do so, as the first two verses of the Duchess are an almost exact translation of the opening verses of Froissart’s Paradis d’amour, which themselves draw upon the complaint of sleeplessness in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse.23 Throughout the Duchess, echoes of poems by Machaut are abundant.24 From two of them, however, Chaucer drew far more than poetic models and courtly phrasing. In the Fonteinne he found an anonymous poet–narrator who overhears a poem of lament recited by a man later identified as a prince; encouraging him to reveal 19

20

21 22 23

24

In his last major work, the Prise d’Alexandre, Machaut paid a final tribute to the lady of the Remede, ‘la milleur dame / quon peuse trouver en ce monde’ (764–5) [the finest lady who could be found anywhere in this world]; ‘ce fu ma dame bonne / bien le say car moult la servi / mais onques si bonne ne vi’ (768–70) [this was my lady Bonne. I knew her well, having performed much good service for her, but never did I lay eyes on any woman this ‘good’]. Text and translation, by line number, from La Prise d’Alexandrie (The Taking of Alexandria), ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 2002), pp. 72–3. J. J. N. Palmer, ‘The Historical Context of the Book of the Duchess: A Revision’, ChR 8/4 (1974), 253–61. Among propositions of later dating see Phillipa Hardman, ‘The Book of the Duchess as a Memorial Monument’, ChR 28/3 (1994), 205–15. John M. Fyler, ‘Froissart and Chaucer’, in Froissart Across the Genres, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 195–218 (at p. 198). Ardis Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy in the Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 33–60 (at pp. 38–42). Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre de la fontaine amoureuse, ed. and trans. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-­Toulet (Paris, 1993), lines 699–707. See James Wimsatt’s comments on this strong evocation in Chaucer and his French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto, 1991), p. 178, and Fyler, ‘Froissart and Chaucer’, pp. 96–9. G. L. Kittredge identifies parallels with the Fontaine amoureuse, Dit dou lyon, Jugement dou roy de Navarre, Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, and Remede de Fortune, along with the eighth Motet and the Lay de confort; see ‘Guillaume de Machaut and The Book of the Duchess’, PMLA 30 (1915), 1–24. See also Colin Wilcockson’s extensive notes to the Duchess in the Riverside Chaucer, pp. 966–75.

124  Sara Sturm-Maddox

his sorrow, he offers him both comfort and consolation. James Wimsatt, in his groundbreaking study of Chaucer’s indebtedness to Machaut, writes that the Fonteinne ‘forms the major connecting link of the dits with the Duchess’, but judges that, while many lines of the Duchess ‘translate the language of the Remede de Fortune, Chaucer generally converts to very different uses the phrases and lines he takes over from this work’.25 Close attention to both poems, however, reveals that it is from the Remede that Chaucer adapted the depiction of the growth of love and the formation of a young man’s character that make of the Man in Black’s story of sorrow a commemoration of both Blanche of Lancaster and John of Gaunt. The cumulative Machaut manuscript brought to England after Poitiers was possibly supervised by Machaut himself; Wimsatt and Kibler suggest that it was prepared for John II not long before the battle, and taken with him to England along with other prized books, and it may well have been the one that Chaucer knew.26 Its splendid illuminations appear to accord the Remede de Fortune and its lady particular prominence.27 The lady who presides over the festivities at a major Valois castle in that poem at once suggests Bonne of Luxembourg, wife of the Duke of Normandy, to whose courtly entertainments Machaut had variously contributed. As noted above, Bonne died, probably of the plague, in 1349, shortly before her husband assumed the throne as John II, and her death would have been widely noted throughout the Anglo-French courtly circles that welcomed the French king into England after Poitiers. Machaut pays tribute to her in the Remede not only as beautiful and charming but also as a paragon of courtly virtues and courtly conduct. The Man in Black’s story is told within that of a narrator who, in a dreaming state, comes upon him as he sits upright beneath a great tree, ‘A wonder wel-farynge knight … / Of good mochel, and ryght yong therto’ (BD 452–4), limning a lament that he yet lives though death has taken his lady. His sorrow appears so overwhelming that the dreamer wonders ‘that Nature / Myght suffre any creature / To have such sorwe and be not ded’ (467–9), and indeed the Man in Black laments that even as he seeks death it flees from him, so that his ‘peyne’ is to be ‘Alway deynge and be not ded’ (587, 588). Consenting at last to tell his story to the dreamer who hopes to console him, he begins by recounting his early thralldom to Love: ‘Syr’, quod he, ‘sith first I kouthe Have any maner wyt fro youthe, 25 26

27

James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Background of the Book of the Duchess (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), p. 110. On this manuscript and its probable importance for Chaucer see Wimsatt and Kibler’s Introduction to Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, pp. 52–4; Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York, 1995), p. 55. See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY, 1987), pp. 242–59.



The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune  125 Or kyndely understondyng To comprehende in any thyng What love was, in myn owne wyt, Dredeles, I have ever yit Be tributarye and yive rente To Love, hooly with good entente, And throgh plesaunce become his thral With good wille, body, hert, and al, Al this I putte in his servage, As to my lord, and dide homage …’

(759–70)

His commitment to Love, however, was not yet invested in his lady: ‘And this was longe, and many a yer / Or that myn herte was set owher, / That I dide thus, and nyste why; / I trowe hit cam me kyndely’ (775–8). Much of what ensues in this preamble closely follows the exordium of the Remede de Fortune, which opens with didactic solemnity. For ‘Cilz qui veult aucun art aprendre’, it counsels, the first step in learning is a choice based on one’s natural inclination: ‘Celui ou ses cuers mieus le tire / Et ou sa nature l’encline’ [He who wishes to learn any skill … must choose something to which his heart most leads him and for which he has a natural inclination] (1, 4–5). The process must begin … en joene aage, Ains que malice son courage Mue par trop grant cognoissance; car le droit estat d’innocence Ressamble proprement la table Blanche, polie, qui est able A recevoir, sans nul contraire, Ce c’on y veut paindre ou pourtraire; Et est aussi comme la cire Qui sueffre dedens li escrire, Ou qui retient forme ou emprainte, Si com on l’a en li emprainte. Ainssi est il certainement De vray humain entendement Qui est ables a recevoir Tout ce c’on veult et concevoir Puet tout ce a quoy on le veult mettre: Armes, amours, autre art, ou lettre.

(23–40)

[at an early age, before his heart turns to wickedness through too much experience; for the true state of innocence is like the white and polished tablet that is ready to receive the exact image of whatever one wishes to portray or paint upon it. And it is also like wax that can be written upon, and which retains the form and imprint exactly as one has imprinted it. Truly it is the same with human understanding,

126  Sara Sturm-Maddox which is ready to receive whatever one wishes and can apprehend whatever one sets it to: arms, love, other art or letter.]

Similarly, the Man in Black remembers that ‘Paraunter I was therto most able, As a whit wal or a table, For hit ys redy to cacche and take Al that men wil theryn make, Whethir so men wil portreye or peynte, Be the werkes never so queynte.    ‘And thilke tyme I ferde ryght so, I was able to have lerned tho, And to have kend as wel or better, Paraunter, other art or letre.’

(779–88)

Nonetheless he had never forgotten his fidelity to Love: ‘For-why I tok hyt of so yong age That malyce hadde my corage Nat that tyme turned to nothing Thorgh to mochel knowlechyng.’

(793–6)

He offers an explanation for that phase of his development: ‘For that tyme Yowthe, my maitresse, Governed me in ydelnesse; For hyt was in my firste youthe, And thoo ful lytel good y couthe, For al my werkes were flyttynge That tyme, and al my thoght varyinge. Al were to me ylyche good That I knew thoo; but thus hit stood…’

(797–804)

Here he continues to adapt closely from the Remede: ‘Pour ce l’ay dit que, quand j’estoie De l’estat qu’innocence avoie, Que Jonnesse me gouvernoit Et en oyseuse me tenoit, Mes oeuvres estoient volages; Varians estoit mes courages; Tout m’estoit un quanque veoie’

(45–51).

[For this reason I have said that when I was in the state of innocence, when Youth governed me and kept me in idleness, my works were fleeting; my heart was changeable: whatever I saw was the same to me…]



The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune  127

I cite these paired passages, many of which Kittredge noted a century ago to demonstrate that Chaucer ‘excerpts freely’ from the Remede,28 to call attention to their preliminary emphasis not on love but on a youth’s formation. These are not unrelated topics in what Stephen Jaeger calls the ‘pedagogy of love’ in courtly culture. ‘Being a major element of life at court’, he argues, ‘love also became part of the education of the nobles’, in which the relation of love and respect between master and pupil and the latter’s desire to imitate the virtues of the former are fundamental in enabling effective learning.29 When a narrator emerges in the Remede, his proposal to illustrate this model of learning with the evidence of his own youthful experience introduces a scene of innamoramento modeled on that in the Roman de la Rose, which is similarly adapted in the Duchess. In the Rose the indifference of an unsuspecting youth dissipates when he beholds a rosebud more beautiful than all others, and it is then that Amours intervenes. Machaut’s protagonist in the Remede is overwhelmed by the presence of a lady whom Nature had made ‘fleur souveraine / Seur toute creature humaine’ [the sovereign flower above all human creatures] (59–60), ‘Et quant Amours vit qu’en ce point / Estoie, elle n’atendi point, / Ains se mella’ [And when Love saw that I’d reached this point, she didn’t hesitate, but rather intervened] (71–3); it is noteworthy here that Amours is feminine in the Remede. Likewise, the Man in Black in the Duchess tells how Fortune had led him to a gathering of lovely ladies, among them one who surpassed all the others in beauty and in all other attributes (817ff). Love had been watching from the sidelines: ‘And Love, that had wel herd my boone, / Had espyed me thus soone, / That she was ful sone in my thoght, / As helpe me God, so was ykaught / So sodenly that I ne tok / No maner counseyl but at hir lok / And at myn herte’ (835–41). At this juncture the two stories have only begun. Each youth is aware that with Love he has undertaken a great enterprise: to learn how to love, and how to be worthy of the lady’s love. In the Remede Amours, who ‘par son art’ had consolidated that commitment, again intervenes: Et quant Amours m’ot a ce mis Que pris fuy et loyaus amis, Elle congnut bien ma jonnesce, Mon innocence, ma simplesce; Et pour ce qu’estoit en enfance, Me prist elle en sa gouvernance. Si me moustra la droite voie.

(136–42)

[And when Love had made me her captive and a loyal lover, she clearly perceived my youth, my innocence, my inexperience; and 28 29

Kittredge, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, pp. 16–17. In this perspective ‘the real and the ideal are contiguous in the values of education. Social values come into sharp focus whenever they contest unshaped nature’ (C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility [Philadelphia, PA, 1999], p. 59).

128  Sara Sturm-Maddox since I was still a child, she took me under her guidance. She showed me the right path.]

Amours taught him how he was to love his lady, and the lady’s temperament and demeanor also instructed him: Amant declares that she was for him ‘mireoir et examplaire / De tous biens desirer et faire’ [my mirror and exemplar for desiring and doing all that is good] (171–2), and that ‘de li venra proprement, / S’en toute ma vie rien vail’ [if ever I am worth anything in my life, it will have come straight from her] (350–1). He enumerates at length the manifestations of her noble incarnation of ‘bonté’ before concluding that ‘Ainssi la tres noble doctrine / Qui tant est precieuse et fine / De la belle me doctrina, / Qui toute bonne doctrine a’ [Thus the fair one, whose person expresses all good lessons, taught me this very noble lesson, which is so precious and fine] (353–6). The Man in Black repeats that when he first saw his lady ‘I was ryght yong, soth to say, And ful grete nede I hadde to lerne; Whan my herte wolde yyerne To love, hyt was a gret empryse. But as my wyt koude best suffise, After my yonge childly wyt, Withoute drede, I besette hyt To love her in my beste wyse, To do hir worship and the servise That I koude thoo, be my trouthe, Without feynynge outher slouthe, For wonder feyn I wolde her se.’

(BD 1090–1101)

He observes her participating with joyful openness in the courtly diversions of her companions, to ‘daunce so comlily, / Carole and synge so swetely, / Laughe and pleye so womanly, / And loke so debonairly’ (848–51).30 He also lauds her exemplary courtliness and her embodiment of goodness, generosity, moderation, truth, and reason; in all things ‘she was lyk to torche bryght / That every man may take of lyght / Ynogh, and hyt hath never the lesse’ (963–5). Neither Amant nor the Man in Black dares to reveal his new and overpowering emotion to the lady in question. Amant explains that ‘pour riens ne li descouvrisse / L’amour de mon cuer, ne deïsse, / Ne descouvrir ne li peüsse, / Se je vousisse ne sceüsse’ [nothing could compel me to reveal or tell her of the love in my heart; nor could I have revealed it to her if I’d wanted to or known how] (363–6). In the Duchess the narrator prompts the Man in Black 30

Colin Wilcockson notes that his praise draws both on the Remede and particularly on Machaut’s earlier Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, as here from Behaingne 297–301 (Riverside Chaucer, p. 973).



The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune  129

to continue with the next phase of his story, eager to know ‘the manere / To hire which was your firste speche – / Therof I wolde you beseche – /And how she knewe first your thoght, / Whether ye loved hir or noght?’ (1130–4) He replies that, despite his deep love for her, ‘yet she nyste hyt nat, never a del / Noght longe tyme, leve hyt wel! / For be ryght siker, I durste noght / For all this world telle hir my thoght, / Ne I wolde have wraththed hir, trewely’ (1147–51). This self-imposed secrecy results in suffering, and both lovers seek to allay it through song. Amant’s compositions give expression to acute fluctuations between joy and pain: Et pour ce que n’estoie mie Tousdis en un point, m’estudie Mis en faire chansons et lays, Baladez, rondeaus, virelays, Et chans, selonc mon sentement, Amoureus et non autrement.

(401–6).

[And since I was not always in one mood, I learned to compose chansons and lais, ballades, rondeaux, virelais, and songs, according to my feelings, about love and nothing less.]

Inspired to sing of his lady to praise and honor her, he composes a lyric ‘qu’on claimme lay’ (430). This poem, ‘Qui n’aroit autre deport, / En amer’ [He who has no other pleasure in love] (431–2), repeats much that he has recounted in the narrative, and is the first of eight lyrics inserted into the Remede; its performative status is emphasized by his indication at its conclusion that ‘Einssi me fist ma dame faire / Ce lay qu’oÿ m’avez retraire’ [Thus my lady inspired me to compose this lai you’ve heard me recite] (681–2).31 The Man in Black recalls that ‘for to kepe me fro ydelnesse, / Trewly I dide my besynesse / To make songes, as I best koude, / And ofte tyme I song hem loude; / And made songes thus a great del’, despite being rather unskilled (BD 1155–9). ‘Algates songes thus I made / Of my felynge, myn herte to glade’, he repeats, and as an example recites his initial effort: ‘Now have I told thee, soth to say, / My firste song’ (1171–2, 1181–2). Neither aspirant fares well in the dreaded first exchange with his lady that finally comes to pass. The Man in Black at last persuades himself that Nature could not have formed such a lovely creature without endowing her with a strong sense of mercy (lines 1195–8).32 He makes an awkward attempt to

31

32

See Kevin Brownlee, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune: The Lyric Anthology as Narrative Progression’, in The Ladder of High Designs: Structure and Interpretation in the French Lyric Sequence, ed. Doranne Fenoaltea and David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville, VA, 1991), pp. 1–25 (at p. 3). Cf. Remede 1671–83, but also Vergier 749–68 and Behaigne 459–62.

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address her, and recovers his composure just enough to pledge his love ‘for evermore’ (1233). Her response, however, is only ‘Nay’, and he steals away in fear and shame (1243). In Amant’s case, his lay by chance comes to her attention anonymously, and when she insists that he read it aloud to her he does so, with bent head and trembling heart (696). When she asks him who had penned it, he is struck dumb with fear and embarrassment and, retreating without asking her leave, begins to weep profusely. Amant takes refuge in the secluded park of Hesdin, initiating an episode that constitutes roughly half of Machaut’s poem. Hesdin was a favorite residence of the Valois kings, and its extraordinary pleasure park created by Robert II of Artois to amaze and entertain his guests was no doubt known to many in Machaut’s immediate audience.33 In that solitary setting Amant gives voice to his sorrow and frustration, first chiding himself and then blaming Love and Fortune, and determines to compose a complaint about the vagaries of the latter. It runs to nearly 600 verses, whereupon, exhausted, he falls into a trance, and suddenly finds beside him a lady more beautiful than any other except his own lady. He marvels that she seems not a human creature but otherworldly, and her face Si clerement resplandissoit Que sa clarté esclarcissoit Les tenebres, la nuit obscure De ma doulereuse aventure, Et de son ray perchoit la nue Qui longuement s’estoit tenue Trouble, noire, onuble, et ombrage Seur mon cuer et seur mon visage.

(1520–26)

[shone so brightly that its brightness lit up the shadows, the dark night of my unhappy adventure, and its ray pierced the cloud that had long loomed troubled, black, shadowy, and gloomy over my heart and my countenance.]

The trope of vision as illumination that qualifies the lady’s arrival clearly derives from Philosophy’s arrival in the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, one of the works from antiquity best known in the fourteenth century.34 Amant feels somewhat comforted, but the effulgent lady who consoles and instructs him in this ‘remede de fortune’ is not Philosophy but Esperance. In the Consolation, Sylvia Huot points out, the songs of Philos33 34

See Anne H. van Buren, ‘Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin’, in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elizabeth McDougall (Washington, DC, 1986), pp. 117–34. Sylvia Huot, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Philosophy’, Modern Philology 100 (2002), 169–95 (at pp. 171–2), noting also the description of Douz Regarz in the Roman de la Rose. Cf. Remede 1257–80, on Amant’s lady. I am grateful to Carolyn Collette for calling my attention to the prominence of this trope in the poem, and for her encouragement.



The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune  131

ophy counsel a captive Boethius to ‘release the soul from desire by reminding it that it already possesses spiritual wealth within itself’.35 The counsel of Esperance, however, addresses the lovelorn misery of Amant, and she introduces her instruction with a chant royal whose terms refer unambiguously to the role of earthly love: Car vraye Amour en cuer d’amant figure Tres dous Espoir et gracïeus Penser: Espoir atrait Joie et Bonne Aventure; Dous Penser fait Plaisace en cuer entrer. Si ne doit plus demander Cilz qui a bonne Esperance, Doulz Penser, Joye, et Plaisance; Car qui plus requiert, je di Qu’Amours l’a guerpi.

(1994–2002)

[for True Love in a lover’s heart creates Very Sweet Hope and amiable Thought: Hope attracts Joy and Good Luck; Sweet Thought causes Pleasure to enter the heart; so he who has good Hope, Sweet Thought, Joy, and Pleasure must not ask for more; for I tell you, if he demands more, Love will abandon him.]

This chanson, Douglas Kelly points out, anticipates the Prologue that Machaut wrote late in life to introduce his works, in which plaisance, esperance, and dous penser are the three gifts, the poetic matiere, that Amour bestows upon him, and which are central to the poet’s ‘evolving conception of good love’.36 In the Remede, in a lengthy lesson filled with courtly precepts, Esperance corrects and cajoles Amant to accept a reorientation of the terms of his desire such that he will derive his ‘bien’ and his ‘souffisance’ from his cherished image of the lady fixed in his heart and from Sweet Thought about her.37 After this encounter Amant feels confident enough to leave the solitary haven of the park. He emerges to find his lady among a circle of dancers participating in a carole, and accepts her invitation to join it, dancing and singing in his turn. In private he avows his love for her, tells her at length of his encounter with Esperance, and admits that he had indeed authored the lay

35 36 37

Huot, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, p. 179. Douglas Kelly, Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction and Poetic Craft (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 22–3. On the thematic prevalence of the struggle between desire and hope in Machaut’s dits, his brief lyrics, and a number of their musical settings see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY, 2011), pp. 131–96.

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he had read to her. The lady adds to Amant’s enthusiastic eulogy of Esperance, and invites him now to assume a new demeanor conforming to the conventional definition of a courtly lover: to be ‘cointes, jolis, et gais, / Loyaus, secrés sans vanterie, / Car vous avés loial amie’ [charming, gay, happy, loyal and discreet, without bragging, for you have a loyal sweetheart] (3836–8). When he later takes leave of her, she solemnly proposes the conjoining of their hearts: ‘Puis qu’Amours a ce vous a mis Que nos .ii. cuers ensemble joindre Vueut sans partir et sans desjoindre, Et que faire vueut .i. de .ii., Pour Dieu, ne faisons paire d’eus; Car il sont perdu et honni Se si pareil et si onni Ne sont qu’en bien et mal commun Soient …’

(4040–8)

[since Love has brought us to join our two hearts together completely and inseparably, and wishes to make two into one, in God’s name, let us make them equal; for they will be lost and shamed if they are not kept alike and united in both good times and bad.]

Amant exchanges a ring Esperance had given him for the one his lady gives him now, and ‘soudainement venoit / Entre nous .ii. Douce Esperance / Pur parfaire ceste aliance, / Dont moult liés et moult joieus fumes / Quant a nostre conseil l’eümes’ [Sweet Hope suddenly appeared between the two of us to complete this alliance, which made us very happy and joyous to have her to advise us] (4080–4). Amant, joyful, departs singing a rondelet. Like Amant, the Man in Black again has occasion to profess his love to his lady. After a long period of withdrawal and morose lethargy, he determines to renew his attempt to make her aware of his suffering. This time his success is immediate: ‘she wel understod / That I ne wilned thyng but god, / And worship, and to kepe hir name / Over alle thynges, and drede hir shame’ (1261–4). Now convinced of the nature and depth of his love, she accepts it and gives him a ring. This simple scene of reciprocal understanding is followed by his avowal that ‘In al my yowthe, in al chaunce, / She took me in hir governaunce’ (1285–6), echoing Amant’s gratitude to Amours early in the Remede (136–42, cited above). Hence a perfect union of two hearts: Oure hertes wern so evene a payre That never nas that oon contrayre To that other for no woo, For sothe, ylyche they suffred thoo Oo blysse and eke oo sorwe bothe; Ylyche they were bothe glad and wrothe; Al was us oon, withoute were.

(1289–95)



The Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune  133

In this harmonious state he and his lady lived ‘ful many a yere / So well I kan nat telle how’ (1296–7). This passage partially echoes the words of Amant’s lady, and follows even more closely the recall in Machaut’s Jugement du roy de Behaigne of the perfect understanding and fulfillment another lady enjoyed with her lover.38 The happiness of this lady, however, belongs to the past, and its recall yields immediately to a despairing account of the suffering she endures since her lover’s death (JB 177–205). Her lament is a major source of that by the Man in Black (596–616), and both end in recriminations: the bereaved lady protests that she has been wronged by Death, and the Man in Black inculpates Fortune for the loss of his queen in their game of chess. Amant too, of course, in the park of Hesdin rages against a fickle and treacherous Fortune. Offering him comfort, Esperance teaches him that hope is the ‘remedy of fortune’, its antidote, for a lover. The consolation he feels, however, is of uncertain duration, for he returns after a brief absence to find his lady distant and less receptive, somehow ‘changie’. When he confesses his fear that she prefers another, she replies that their relationship must conform to a fundamental imperative of courtly love, that of inviolable secrecy, and that whatever she may do is in order to protect their love by concealing it: ‘Car qui en amour ne scet faindre, / Il ne puet a grant joye ataindre, / N’il n’a pouoir de bien celer / Ce qu’il ne vorroit reveler’ [because a lover who does not know how to feign cannot attain great joy, if he does not have the strength to hide well what he doesn’t want to reveal] (4201–4). Thereafter Amant frequently suffers new fears, anguish and melancholy, but he concludes that he has no choice but to believe his lady. He entrusts himself to the good offices of Amour, and the future remains uncertain. The future is not uncertain in the Man in Black’s outburst against Fortune, which Wimsatt deemed the ‘one substantial narrative element of Chaucer’s poem’ derived from the Remede.39 His accusation is embedded in his response to the dreamer’s request to know the origin of his sorrow: ‘For fals Fortune hath pleyd a game / Atte ches with me, allas the while! … / With hir false draughtes dyvers / She staal on me and tok my fers’ (618–19, 653–4). But, just as there is no counterpart to the episode of Hesdin in the Duchess, there is no allegorical Esperance to offer comfort and consolation. On the contrary: the Man in Black defines his irremediable loss to Fortune with a negative echo of Esperance’s instruction in the Remede concerning ‘suffisance’ and ‘plaisance’, lamenting that with the loss of his queen ‘I have lost suffisance, / And therto I have no pleasance, … / And whan al this falleth in my thoght, / Allas, than am I overcome!’ (703–7). The shadow of Blanche of Lancaster’s death, like that of fair White, hangs

38 39

See Wimsatt and Kibler’s edition of Jugement, lines 164–76. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, p. 110.

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over the Book of the Duchess. It is the fact that is not comprehended, or perhaps not accepted, by the dreamer until the Man in Black tersely ends his story with the declaration that ‘She ys ded!’ (1309). Many in Chaucer’s audience might have anticipated it from the Man in Black’s first lyric, but it is approached in the poem with ‘evasion and circumlocution’.40 Its deferment, as Steve Ellis argues, intensifies its impact such that its confirmation ‘comes with extraordinary and shocking abruptness’,41 and that sense of abruptness is magnified by the story of fulfilled hope that precedes it. Unlike the ambiguous conclusion of Amant’s story in Machaut’s Remede, that of the Man in Black announces an ideal union. Chaucer has cast the praise of Blanche of Lancaster in terms that exalt not only her but her husband John of Gaunt as well, and Gaunt’s sorrow is as compelling a subject in the Duchess as the memory of Blanche’s exceptional beauty and virtue. The poet clearly assumed that not only Gaunt but the courtly society in which he and Blanche figured so prominently would respond to a poem that was not formally an elegy but rather, as Phillipa Hardman observes, a poem ‘of sorrow for that ideal love relationship, for an unforgettable past happiness that cannot be recovered’.42 The title of the Remede de Fortune, evoking Boethius’s widely read Consolation of Philosophy, was rich in promise in a society confronted with waves of misfortune in recurrences of warfare and of plague. Chaucer, however, well familiar with the Consolation, knew as well as Machaut that the consolation offered in the Remede was not that of Philosophy, and surely knew too that the consolation of Esperance in Machaut’s poem, in its non-engagement with the certainty and sorrow of death, was not likely to be of great comfort to a grieving husband. The Duchess suggests that some consolation might be found, both by him and by the many others who had loved and admired Blanche, in happiness and beauty remembered.43 The union of Blanche and Gaunt, however, was not only an affecting private story in Chaucer’s poem; it was also an episode of major dynastic significance in the history of the realm. The elite and well-read audience whose complicity Chaucer had invited and relied upon in the telling of the private story was also an audience capable of deciphering his memorialization of the story of Blanche of Lancaster and John of Gaunt, now part of history, in the final image of the Man in Black riding ‘homwarde’ toward ‘A long castel with walles white, / Be Seynt Johan, on a ryche hil’ (1315, 1318–19).44 40 41 42 43

44

Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, pp. 35–6. Ellis, ‘Death’, p. 256. Hardman, ‘The Book of the Duchess’, p. 212. This is what A. J. Minnis calls ‘the consolation of experience’. See Minnis with V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995), pp. 158–9. Hardman argues that the Duchess ‘functions as a verbal equivalent of the tomb erected by John of Gaunt as a memorial to Blanche and to his own grief’ (‘The Book of the Duchess’, p. 213).

7 ‘Hyt am I’: Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess, the Roman de la rose, and the Fonteinne Amoureuse* PHILIP KNOX

In his account of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, the narrator of the Book of the Duchess describes how Juno sends a messenger to the god of sleep. In the versions of this story with which Chaucer was familiar, the messenger is identified as the goddess Iris, but in Chaucer’s telling he becomes male and is given no name.1 The messenger finds the slumbering bodies of the god and his company lying in the dark cave in which they live, and he rouses them by blowing his horn and crying, ‘Awaketh!’ (BD 183). Morpheus, displeased, opens one eye to ask, ‘Who clepeth ther?’ (185). Before going on to relate Juno’s orders, the messenger responds with three simple words of self-­identification: ‘Hyt am I’, quod this messager.

(186)

In this brief scene of recognition, the messenger’s voice, or his presence before Morpheus as an embodied voice, is enough to transmit unproblematically some sense of his identity, even as Chaucer deliberately suppresses the *

This essay has been greatly improved by helpful comments and suggestions from Jamie Fumo, Mark Griffith, Juliette Vuille, and Jill Mann. I have also benefited from the useful discussion that followed my presentation of a version of this essay at the Medieval English Graduate Seminar, University of Cambridge.

1

See Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford, 2004), 11.585– 91; Machaut, Fonteinne Amoureuse, line 615, in Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner, 3 vols, Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1908–21). Froissart also uses the name ‘Iris’ in Paradys d’Amours, line 24, in Œuvres de Froissart: Poésies, ed. Auguste Scheler, 3 vols (Brussels, 1870–72; repr. Geneva, 1977). All subsequent references are to these editions. For a possible source for the discrepancy in gender see the note to line 134 in the edition of Book of the Duchess in Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, ed. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely (London, 1997).

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proper name that might help his readers anchor their understanding of who this figure might be. The scene encapsulates, I believe, one of the central concerns of the Book of the Duchess: What is the relationship between a thing spoken and the one who speaks it? Represented in a ‘book’ – the ‘book’ of the Duchess2 – this concern expands to embrace something yet more fundamental to the work itself: What is the relationship between a thing written and the one who writes it? The sense that linguistic self-referentiality might be enough to guarantee the link between voice and self (and the troubling and necessary implication that it might not be) finds an echo in the narrator’s only attempt at self-identification: ‘I, that made this book’ (96). In a work in which Chaucer explores his position in relation to a known extra-textual figure, John of Gaunt, the question of how one should speak for oneself becomes particularly urgent, even if the answer remains oddly elusive. In this essay, I will attempt to shed some new light on this aspect of the Book of the Duchess by reading it alongside two earlier texts produced in continental France, whose central importance for Chaucer’s poem has long been recognised: the Roman de la rose, written in two stages by its two different authors in the thirteenth century, and the fourteenth-century Fonteinne Amoureuse of Guillaume de Machaut. A century or more of scholarship has illuminated various ways in which the Book of the Duchess interacts with continental francophone literature, and my desire here is not to add to the vast directory of literary correspondences. Indeed, I do not believe that the Rose or the works of Machaut gained their importance for Chaucer as passive repositories of style, form, or narrative material. Instead, I wish to argue that they furnished Chaucer with both a way of writing and a way of thinking about writing. They supplied Chaucer with a series of textual manoeuvres that made available a form of literary self-interrogation.3 I will attempt to illustrate this with a series of four readings. I will begin by examining a single episode in each of the French texts under scrutiny, before turning to two important points of resonance in the Book of the Duchess – the second of these, by far the most complex, will take up most of this investigation. By attending to the difficulties and the dissonances in Chaucer’s poem and the texts with which it is in contact, I hope to show that Chaucer was deeply engaged with a host of problematic questions that clustered around the relationship between voice and identity.

2

3

Chaucer uses the title ‘The book of the Duchesse’ in his Retractions, CT X, 1086–8. For some reflections on this term, see Jamie C. Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (Cardiff, 2015), pp. 82–6. Nicolette Zeeman discusses how figures and tropes can constitute a kind of literary theory, in ‘Imaginative Theory’, in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford, 2007), pp. 222–40 (discussion of BD at pp. 233–4). For more on the philosophical force of medieval poetry, see Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, eds, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the ‘Rose’ to the Rhétoriquers (Ithaca, NY, 2011).



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  137

But, before turning to the texts themselves, something remains to be said about some of the terms I have used in my title, and the sense in which I will deploy them in the present study. The first of these is ‘voice’. In his two most recent monographs, A. C. Spearing has critiqued the over-simplistic way in which the notion of voice has been used to delimit the complexities of texts: the ‘voice of the text’, when taken to be the voice of the represented narrator, is too often imagined to emanate from a psychologised self whose intentions and prejudices can be analysed.4 But while Spearing dismantles the notion that a medieval text’s narratorial ‘voice’ might belong to some fictive narratorial consciousness, this does not mean that voice itself (or at least the idea of voice) has lost its usefulness as a critical category. Indeed, Spearing’s insights seem if anything to demand a new and newly refined attention to the complexities of voice in medieval poetry. David Lawton, in an important recent study of the Book of the Duchess, explores this poem’s concern with voice without reinscribing the notion of an ever-present, ironisable narrator (something that Lawton had already done much to combat in earlier work).5 Texts that occupy the position of an I, je, or ego seem to raise questions about the nature of voice with particular urgency – especially if one accepts an influential definition of the first-person pronoun: ‘I signifies “the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I”.’6 But while there is enormous value in recognising that subjectivity is something produced in language, one of the things I am interested in exploring in this essay is how the users of language come into contact with this linguistic subjectivity – something with which they coincide, but to which they are not identical. I do not refer to ‘selves’ in my title in order to make any claim for 4

5

6

A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford, 2005), esp. pp. 17–31; Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text (Notre Dame, IN, 2012), esp. pp. 1–32; ‘What is a Narrator? Narrator Theory and Medieval Narratives’, Digital Philology 4 (2015), 59–105. David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford, 2017), pp. 42–60. Lawton anticipated many of Spearing’s insights throughout his earlier Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge, 1985). Another early critique of psychologised readings of medieval narrators can be found in Robert Jordan, Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader (Berkeley, CA, 1987), pp. 5–21. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami Linguistics Series 8 (Coral Gables, FL, 1977), p. 218. Much has been written on the I, je, or ego in medieval poetry: see Leo Spitzer, ‘A Note on the Poetic and Empirical “I” in Medieval Authors’, Traditio 4 (1940), 414–22; Paul Zumthor, Langue, texte, énigme (Paris, 1975), pp. 181–96; Michel Zink, La subjectivité littéraire: Autour de siècle de saint Louis (Paris, 1985); Catherine Attwood, Dynamic Dichotomy: The Poetic ‘I’ in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Poetry (Amsterdam, 1998); Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge, 1990); Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore, MD, 2003), pp. 29–62; Helen J. Swift, ‘The Poetic I’, in A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Deborah McGrady and Jennifer Bain (Leiden, 2012), pp. 15–32; Spearing, Medieval Autographies. Peter Travis discusses the I of the Book of the Duchess in ‘White’, SAC 22 (2000), 1–66 (at pp. 35–53).

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some irreducible human essence that inheres in each individual, but rather to frame a way of exploring, as far as possible, how medieval writers encounter or inhabit the textual subjectivity of their writings as extra-textual entities. The idea of voice seems to be one useful way of formulating these questions. To turn to voice is not, however, to assert the metaphysical priority of speech. Indeed, voice gains much of its interest precisely because writing and speech are entangled in an importantly problematic relationship – a complex interaction of immediacy and mediation.7 This interaction becomes, perhaps, even more complex in a culture in which self-consciously ‘written’ or ‘bookish’ texts may have been read aloud in public.8 Newly sensitised to the complexity of voice by scholars like Spearing and Lawton, my argument in this essay is that, in the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer manipulates a literary tradition that already takes as a theme the problematics of the representation of speech in writing. He does so in order to explore a fundamental literary or literary– theoretical problem: What is the connection between what we say and who we are?

Narratorial Bodies in the Roman de la rose The Roman de la rose is an allegorical love narrative composed in two stages by two different authors in the thirteenth century. The first part, of about 4,000 lines, begins as an account of a dream the narrator had as a young man, and ends unexpectedly without closing the dream frame. The despairing dreamer is left lamenting his woeful state, separated from Bel Acueil (a personification of his lady’s ‘fair welcome’) and the Rose itself (the lady, or some aspect of the lady or her body), both of whom have been imprisoned behind the fortifications of the Castle of Jealousy.9 The second part begins unannounced, silently taking up and continuing the apparently unfinished narrative, as the dreamer relates the long series of encounters that led him to

7

8 9

Influenced by Anne Banfield’s Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston, 1982) and, in turn, Jacques Derrida’s critique of ‘phonocentrism’ or ‘logocentrism’ in Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [corrected edn, Baltimore, MD, 1997]), Spearing does at points try to draw limits around the usefulness of ‘voice’ as a tool in literary studies (Textual Subjectivity, pp. 8, 29, 118–19). For a helpful survey of some of the ideas that lie in the background here, see the section entitled ‘Writing and Logocentrism’ in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London, 1983), pp. 89–110. For some interesting thoughts on voice, see Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, 2000), pp. 3–43. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996). David Hult argues compellingly that Guillaume’s poem is left deliberately unfinished: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First ‘Roman de la Rose’ (Cambridge, 1986), p. 6.



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  139

the consummation of his sexual desire for the Rose and the conclusion of his dream, bringing the total length of the conjoined poem to just over 20,000 lines. In this second, longer section, we learn that the author of the first part was called Guillaume de Lorris, that he died before finishing his poem, and that the author of the continuation we are reading is called Jean de Meun. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Rose for fourteenth-­ century literary culture in France and England, and impossible to overstate its centrality for Chaucer in particular.10 It remains, however, relatively under-represented in the many detailed accounts of the French ‘sources’ of the Book of the Duchess, and studies that do look at the relation of the two texts tend to emphasise the importance of Guillaume de Lorris’s section as the ultimate point of origin for a number of conventions of setting and tone.11 While Skeat saw many parallels between the Book of the Duchess and both sections of the Rose, Kittredge emphasised closer analogues in Froissart and above all Machaut, and scholars since Kittredge have continued to reveal the poem’s close relationship with fourteenth-century French writing.12 Yet, of all the many poems that reverberate through the Book of the Duchess, the Rose is the only work to be cited by title (lines 333–4) and, even in this brief reference to the ‘text and glose’ of the Rose, Chaucer seems to be knowingly gesturing towards the poem’s playful complexities and deferrals.13 10

11

12

13

The foundational studies of the reception of the Rose in the fourteenth century are PierreYves Badel, Le ‘Roman de la Rose’ au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’œuvre (Geneva, 1980), and Sylvia Huot, The ‘Romance of the Rose’ and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge, 1993). I review its English reception in ‘The “Romance of the Rose” in Fourteenth-Century England’, unpub. DPhil thesis (Oxford, 2015). For example, James Wimsatt’s chapter on the Rose and the Book of the Duchess in Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Background of the Book of the Duchess (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), pp. 5–29, does not mention Jean’s section of the poem. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, p. 52, is an exception, arguing that the narratorial persona of the Book of the Duchess reveals the profound impact of Jean de Meun. Helen Phillips argues that the Rose, Machaut and Boethius constitute a complex of intertextual relations that cannot be easily unpicked: ‘Fortune and the Lady: Machaut, Chaucer, and the Intertextual “Dit”’, Nottingham French Studies 38/2 (1999), 120–36 (at pp. 122–4). The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. W. W. Skeat, 6 vols with suppl. vol. (Oxford, 1894–97), vol. 1, pp. 462–95 (note that Skeat uses Chaucer’s familiarity with the Rose in the Duchess to argue that he has already translated the Roman de la rose, p. 63); G. L. Kittredge, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and The Book of the Duchess’, PMLA 30 (1915), 1–24. For more studies of Machaut’s relation to the Book of the Duchess, see below, n. 20. For a detailed analysis of Chaucer’s debt to the Rose, see Dean Spurill Fansler, Chaucer and the ‘Roman de la Rose’ (New York, 1914); see also the review of criticism in Chaucer, Romaunt of the Rose, ed. Charles Dahlberg (Norman, OK, 1999), pp. 32–46. John V. Fleming (The ‘Roman de la Rose’: A Study in Allegory and Iconography [Princeton, NJ, 1969], p. 9) and the Riverside editors (Book of the Duchess, lines 333–4n) incline towards the reading that the ‘glose’ seen by the narrator on the walls of his dream-chamber refers to illustrations. Yet both Guillaume’s and Jean’s narratives repeatedly promise, yet never deliver, revelations of the senefiance of their allegories (see Rose, lines 980–4, 2065–

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The scene on which I wish to focus in relation to the Book of the Duchess is not, however, explicitly cited, nor is it echoed verbally in any straightforward way. It occurs in Jean de Meun’s section of the poem.14 The God of Love has come to the aid of the lover–narrator, who remains desperate to liberate Bel Acueil from the Castle of Jealousy and pluck the rose. Amor assembles an allegorical army, and, before a long intrusion from the alarmingly indeterminate Faux-Semblant, he addresses his troops with ‘une brieve parole’ [a short speech] (10464).15 What follows is a loose imitation of Ovid’s elegy for Tibullus in the Amores, where Ovid describes Cupid mourning the death of Tibullus.16 In Jean de Meun’s version, the God of Love himself speaks about the loss of Tibullus, ‘qui connoisset si bien mes teiches’ [who knew my characteristics so well] (10479), and recalls breaking his arrows and bow in grief, just as he was imagined to do in the Ovidian version (lines 10480–2). Jean’s God of Love also mourns the death of other Roman love-poets, including the writer of the elegy he is imitating: ‘Gallus, Catillus et Ovides / qui bien sorent d’amors trestier’ [Gallus, Catullus, and Ovid, who knew well how to write about love] (10492–3). The God of Love then names a further poet, Guillaume de Lorris. But this ‘Guillaume’ is present in the narrative, standing in front of the God of Love in the body of the narrator: Vez ci Guillaume de Lorriz, cui Jalousie, sa contraire, fet tant d’angoisse et de deul traire qu’il est en perill de morir.

(10496–9)

[Behold here Guillaume de Lorris, whom Jealousy, his opponent, caused to experience so much anxiety and pain that he is in danger of death.]17

14

15

16

17

74, 15115–20, 21183–4). In imagining a ‘text’ of the Rose that comes complete with its ‘glose’, Chaucer hints at something conspicuously absent from the poem itself – perhaps something that can be found only in a dream. Many scholars have examined this passage; I benefited particularly from Karl D. Uitti, ‘From Clerc to Poète: The Relevance of the Romance of the Rose to Machaut’s World’, in Machaut’s World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Bruce Chandler (New York, 1978), pp. 209–16; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Orpheus’s Song Re-Sung: Jean de Meun’s Reworking of Metamorphoses X’, Romance Philology 36 (1982), 201–9 (esp. p. 208), n. 15; Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, pp. 54–60. All references are to Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols, Classiques français du Moyen Âge 92, 95, 98 (Paris, 1965–75). All unattributed translations are my own. Cf. Amores, Book 3, lines 7–12; references are to the text in Ovid, Amores; Medicamina Faciei Femineae; Ars Amatoria; Remedia Amoris, ed. Edward J. Kenney, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford, 1994). The best study of the importance of Ovidian elegy to the Rose is Sylvia Huot, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets: Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the ‘Roman de la Rose’ (London, 2010). Although vez ci is the etymological ancestor of Modern French voici (‘here is’), in this



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  141

Although the je of the Rose shifts restlessly into different positions and roles,18 here the narrator is momentarily portrayed as if he were a concrete figure within the fiction, and is given the name ‘Guillaume de Lorris’. But although ‘Guillaume’ is present in the fiction of the poem, standing before the army, the God of Love then prophesies that Guillaume will go on to write the ‘romant’ (105219) that describes his adventures (that is, the romance we are already reading), and will continue writing up until the point of his death. The God of Love even specifies the lines at which Guillaume’s narrative will stop, quoting, at lines 10525–30, the three couplets that had appeared earlier in the text, at lines 4023–28, as the final lines of Guillaume’s section. In other words, by telling his army where Guillaume’s text will end, the God of Love’s speech also reveals that this textual event has already taken place, several thousand lines earlier in the narrative. Having quoted the closing lines of Guillaume’s part of the poem, the God of Love says, ‘Ci se reposera Guillaumes’ (10532): that is, ‘here Guillaume will cease’ – although whether the ‘here’ refers to a point in narrative time or a point in the text that the reader encountered earlier as line 4028, remains an open question. The God of Love’s strangely comic and disjointed elegy continues as he prays that Guillaume’s tomb will be filled with sweet odours (lines 10532–4), before prophesying the arrival of a new figure, ‘Johans Chopinel […] qui nestra seur Laire a Meün’ [Jean Chopinel, who will be born at Meung-surLoire] (10535–7). This figure, the God of Love reports, will continue from the point at which Guillaume leaves off, and at lines 10565–6 we are once again given a quotation from an earlier part of the poem: the first couplet of Jean’s continuation, which the reader has already encountered as lines 4029–30, the point at which Jean de Meun silently picked up the thread of the Lover’s complaint that had been left suspended in incompletion by Guillaume. The richness and strangeness of this passage cannot be dealt with briefly, and in this space I will draw out only the broadest implications that seem relevant to the Book of the Duchess.19 The God of Love’s speech reveals that Jean de Meun’s authorship of the poem began at the point at which Guillaume de Lorris’s narrative came to an end. But in the course of revealing this, the God of Love portrays ‘Guillaume de Lorris’ as present within the fiction in the form of the narrator (‘here is Guillaume’). In other words, Jean claims

18

19

period it retained the literal force of the plural imperative form of voir, ‘to see’; therefore ‘see here’ or ‘behold here’. For this aspect of the text in Guillaume’s section, see E. B. Vitz, ‘The I of the Roman de la rose’, Genre 6 (1973), 49–75; for similar issues in Jean’s section, see Kevin Brownlee, ‘Jean de Meun and the Limits of Romance: Genius as Rewriter of Guillaume de Lorris’, in Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover, NH, 1985), pp. 114–34. For some others, see Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, pp. 97–8.

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that the voice of the narrator at this point can be attributed to a particular individual, even as he evacuates the possibility of that attribution by also revealing that he himself is the author controlling the actions and words of this je. The fiction that the narrator of Jean’s poem is the (supposedly) historical Guillaume de Lorris will not be sustained throughout the text, but at this point it is a remarkable act of ventriloquism made all the more striking by Jean’s claim that Guillaume’s projected future ‘repose’ from writing is in fact a repose in death. For a moment, the je of the text is a reanimated voice from beyond the grave, but at the same time it is revealed to be nothing more than Jean de Meun inhabiting the narratorial body of his predecessor. Finally, what is perhaps most important about this passage is its tonally dissonant status as a quasi-comic elegy for a sequence of love poets; when we are told that the fictional je of the poem, Guillaume de Lorris, is going to die, we realise that he is already dead. The unavoidable implication seems to be that Jean de Meun will be next to join Tibullus and Ovid, and that the textual record of his self, his je (which is, after all, all that lies behind the je of Guillaume) will become as uncannily empty as that of his predecessor. Some of the implications of this strange passage, I am going to argue, open up new ways of thinking about Chaucer’s poem.

Voicing Selves in the Fonteinne Amoureuse I turn now to the second episode from continental literature on which I wish to focus: Guillaume de Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse, itself deeply connected to the Roman de la rose, and a text likewise invested in exploring the complexities and difficulties of voice and identity. Our understanding of how Chaucer deploys extracts and echoes from Machaut in the Book of the Duchess has been greatly elucidated by a number of detailed comparative studies.20 I will adduce no new parallels here, but I will briefly examine a passage in the Fonteinne Amoureuse (dated 1360–61) which plays with the idea of voice in a way that is, I will argue, highly suggestive for the Book of the Duchess.21 The Fonteinne Amoureuse is a dit, a genre that is heavily indebted to the 20

21

The argument was first made by Kittredge, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’. Much has been added by two seminal studies by James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, pp. 70–117, and Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto, 1991), pp. 77–173. See also William Calin, ‘Machaut’s Legacy: The Chaucerian Inheritance Reconsidered’, in Chaucer’s French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of Self and Tradition, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1999), pp. 29–46, and The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto, 1994), pp. 272–301; R. Barton Palmer, ‘The Book of the Duchess and Fonteinne Amoureuse: Chaucer and Machaut Reconsidered’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 7/4 (1980), 380–93. The date is discussed in Machaut, Œuvres, ed. Hoepffner, vol. 3, p. xxx. My research into



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  143

Roman de la rose, characterised by a peculiar self-consciousness about its own textual processes.22 After an introductory section in which Machaut reveals through a cryptogram his name and the name of ‘Celui pour qui je fais ce livre’ [He for whom I make this book] (32),23 the action of the poem begins with the narrator recounting how he overheard one evening the indistinct moans of a ‘creature’ (line 70). Listening more closely, the sound resolves itself into a human voice, the voice of a man expressing his sadness at the necessity of departing from his lady (lines 200–3). The voice goes on to utter a formal lyric complaint; the narrator quickly takes up his writing materials or ‘escriptoire’ (line 229) and transcribes what he overhears. The long complaint, prosodically distinct from the couplets that have preceded it, is presented in the text (lines 235–1034). This complaint participates in the rich tradition of lyric insertion so typical of the dit, and here as elsewhere Machaut’s placement of the lyric inside the narrative allows the text’s lyric and narrative aspects to reflect upon each other. In the complaint, the speaker laments his enforced separation from his lady, before retelling the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. This is likely to have informed Chaucer’s own use of this work in the Book of the Duchess.24 The next morning Machaut’s narrator investigates the source of the sound and meets an aristocratic young man who has been occupying the adjoining room. After conversing with the young knight and hearing him speak elegantly about love, the narrator is pleased to realise that this was the voice he had heard through the wall, since ‘c’estoit cil / Qui avoit l’engin si soutil’ [it was he who had such a subtle intelligence] (1513–4). Although it is not directly stated, the strong implication is that this man is to be identified in some way with Jean, duc de Berry, cryptogrammatically named in the prologue; during the composition of this poem he was waiting to be sent to England in a hostage arrangement that would bring about his actual historical separation from his young wife.25 The two men

22

23

24 25

Machaut has been greatly facilitated by Lawrence Earp’s Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York, 1995). For a discussion of this genre, see Daniel Poirion, ‘Traditions et fonctions du dit poétique au XIVe et au XVe siècle’, in Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spämittelalters, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Begleitreihe zum Grundriss der Romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters 1 (Heidelberg, 1980), pp. 147–50; Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Le Clerc et l’écriture: Le Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut et la définition du dit’, in Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spämittelalters, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Begleitreihe zum Grundriss der Romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters 1 (Heidelberg, 1980), pp. 151–68; and esp. Spearing, Medieval Autographies, pp. 33–64. For more on Machaut’s anagrammatic signatures, see Lawrence de Looze, ‘“Mon nom trouveras”: A New Look at the Anagrams of Guillaume de Machaut – The Enigmas, Responses, and Solutions’, Romanic Review 79 (1988), 537–57. Palmer, ‘The Book of the Duchess’, pp. 382–7. Douglas Kelly, ‘The Genius of the Patron: The Prince, Poet, and Fourteenth-Century Invention’, in Chaucer’s French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of Self and Tradition, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1999), pp. 1–27 (at pp. 3–4).

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go walking together, and the knight asks the narrator to compose for him a complaint (lines 1505–7). The narrator produces the poem he had transcribed the previous evening and reads it aloud. The knight is delighted to find his own words in the mouth of the narrator, and the two men fall asleep together and share a dream. Whose is the voice of the long complaint of the Fonteinne Amoureuse?26 I ask this question not because I think that this is how one must approach a poem, but because it is a question that Machaut’s text invites, even as it renders a straightforward answer inaccessible.27 When the narrator presents the patron’s complaint as his own, he seems to suggest that no poet could capture the knight’s emotions better than the knight himself, but at the same time he implies that no poet could capture the knight’s emotions better than Machaut, who is, we must assume, the complaint’s actual author.28 It is both a delicate compliment and an act of potentially rather risky self-­ aggrandisement. The blurring of their very consciousnesses in their shared dream and the intermixing of their names in the cryptogram that identifies them both add to the impression that this voice is somehow plural, and that the je of the complaint cannot refer absolutely to the knight, nor to ‘Machaut the narrator’. Similarly fraught complexities, I will argue, can be found in the relationship between voice and identity in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess.

26

27

28

Note Spearing’s interesting exploration of this question, Medieval Autographies, p. 63. See also Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, WI, 1984), p. 204; Huot, ‘Reading the Lies of the Poets: The Literal and the Allegorical in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse’, Philological Quarterly 85 (2006), 25–48 (at pp. 33–4); Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), pp. 276–9. Helen Vendler offers this advice to readers of lyric poetry: ‘As you read a poem, ask yourself questions about the speaker constructed within the poem. Where is he or she in time and space? Over how long a period? With what motivations?’: Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Boston, MA, 1997), p. 188. Jonathan Culler argues persuasively against this view of lyric, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA, 2015), pp. 109–19. Jean, duc de Berry did write lyric poetry (a ballade of his survives in Jean le Seneschal et al., Les Cent Ballades, ed. Gaston Rayaund, Société des anciens textes français [Paris, 1905], pp. 213–14), and fourteenth-century French poets did write narratives designed to house the lyric poems of their patrons (Froissart does so in his Meliador, on which see Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le prince: L’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans [Paris, 1965], pp. 147, 208; Kelly, ‘Genius of the Patron’, pp. 5–6). But there is no reason to suppose that the patron of Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse was capable of writing something of the length and complexity of the complaint that appears at lines 235–1034. For more on Jean’s ballade, see James Wimsatt, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and Chaucer’s Love Lyrics’, Medium Ævum 47 (1978), 66–87 (at p. 83 n. 43); Butterfield, ‘French Culture and the Ricardian Court’, in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford, 1997), pp. 82–120 (at p. 115).



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  145

Bodies and Voices in the Book of the Duchess I began this essay with a brief summary of the scene in the Book of the Duchess in which Juno’s messenger identifies himself before the God of Sleep, and for what remains of this essay I am going to turn to two further episodes in that poem to explore how some of the issues raised by the passages I have looked at in the Rose and the Fonteinne Amoureuse are refracted through Chaucer’s text. Juno’s anonymous messenger’s simple ‘Hyt am I’ triggers a recognition in the mind of Morpheus; accordingly, this scene seems to present a kind of ideal, unproblematic and unmediated identification of self with utterance. But other scenes in the Book of the Duchess suggest that this might be an unattainable ideal, while also revealing the deep imprint of Chaucer’s encounter with both Jean de Meun and Machaut. The first of these episodes also occurs in the Ceyx and Alcyone story. Chaucer deviates from both Ovid’s and Machaut’s version of this story in a number of ways. One striking deviation relates to Alcyone’s encounter with the deceased Ceyx, before her final and fatal lapse into grief. In the Metamorphoses, Somnus sends a vision of an imago to the mourning queen (11.587–8); in Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse, the god of sleep recruits his son, called Morpheus, and instructs him to take on the fourme of the drowned king and appear to Alcyone in a dream (lines 658–60). In Chaucer’s version, we first hear about what will happen through Juno, as she details to her messenger the instructions he must pass on to the god of sleep (here rebaptised Morpheus): Sey thus on my half: that he Go faste into the Grete Se, And byd hym that, on alle thyng, He take up Seys body the kyng, That lyeth ful pale and nothyng rody. Bid hym crepe into the body And doo hit goon to Alcione The quene, ther she lyeth allone, And shewe hir shortly, hit is no nay, How hit was dreynt thys other day; And do the body speke ryght soo, Ryght as hyt was woned to doo The whiles that hit was alyve.

(BD 139–51)

Rather than transmit a vision or take on a new shape, Chaucer’s Morpheus is commanded to physically ‘crepe into’ the dead body of the king, and ‘do the body speke’ as Ceyx did in life. He carries out the orders to the letter: Morpheus takes up the ‘dreynte body’ (195), and delivers a speech in the voice of Ceyx at the foot of Alcyone’s bed:

146  Philip Knox My swete wyf, Awake! Let be your sorwful lyf, For in your sorwe there lyth no red; For certes, swete, I am but ded.

(201–4)

I can think of no closer parallel in medieval literature to this morbid act of ventriloquism than Jean de Meun’s suggestion that he is inhabiting the narratorial body of the now deceased Guillaume de Lorris, and later I will try to draw out some of the implications of this parallel. Just as Juno’s messenger is dispatched to Morpheus (at whom he cries out ‘Awaketh’, 183), Morpheus is dispatched to Alcyone in the body of Ceyx (from which he calls out ‘Awake’). But while the messenger’s ‘Hyt am I’ is an instantly transparent self-­identification, the ‘I’ who speaks in the voice of Ceyx, and who is recognised and accepted as the king by Alcyone, is a fiction. The king’s apparent resurrection is a trick of magic and impersonation, and indeed it almost proclaims itself to be so in the impossible assertion of presence and absence we hear from Morpheus/Ceyx: ‘I am but ded.’ It is the very fact that Ceyx is already dead that allows him to appear in this strange fictive performance before the distraught queen; likewise, it was the fact that Guillaume de Lorris was already dead that allowed Jean de Meun to evoke him as ‘present’ within the bounds of his own fiction: ‘Vez ci Guillaume’. Alcyone’s vision prompts her acceptance of Ceyx’s death, which in turn plunges her into a sorrow so profound that she dies within three days – but this acceptance is founded upon an essentially deceitful performance. It is unclear whether the effect should be poignant or bleak, but if nothing else it shows the complexity of the idea of voice in Chaucer’s poem. It would be going too far to suggest that the macabre reanimation of Ceyx’s body is Chaucer’s way of figuring the poetic representation of voice tout court, but it does offer a hint that Chaucer is using the imaginative resources of his poem to explore the powers and the limitations of the voice in narration. Having examined passages from the Rose, the Fonteinne Amoureuse, and the first part of the Book of the Duchess, I will turn now to a second and more difficult example from Chaucer’s poem of what might be called the ‘problem’ of voice in that work.29 This passage constitutes something of a crux, and relates to Chaucer’s Man in Black’s revelation of the death of his beloved lady. As John Lawlor first observed, the whole Man in Black episode in the Book of the Duchess is essentially a recalibration of the love debate depicted by Machaut in the Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne.30 Whereas in that poem the narrator overhears a conversation between two figures – a knight describing how he has been betrayed in love and a lady recounting that her 29 30

Cf. Lawton, Voice, p. 46. John Lawlor, ‘The Pattern of Consolation in The Book of the Duchess’, Speculum 31/4 (1956), 626–48 (at p. 638).



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  147

lover has died – in the Book of the Duchess the two perspectives are synthesised through Chaucer’s innovative device. At first, the Man in Black’s grief is presented as if its cause were a familiar problem (separation from his lady, perhaps, or his lady’s dangier, or some intervention from Jealousy or similar enemy, as at the end of Guillaume’s Rose), but the source of his sorrow is then revealed in stark language to be his lady’s death – ‘She ys ded!’ (1309). This abrupt revelation leads to the poem’s swift unravelling and conclusion. Readers familiar with the Book of the Duchess, however, will recognise that there is a problem with the short account of the poem I have just given. When the Man in Black proclaims the stark truth behind his grief, this is not, strictly speaking, a revelation. When we first encounter the Man in Black, he is described as uttering a lyrical ‘compleynte’ in which he clearly states that his lady is dead: ‘I have of sorwe so gret won That joye gete I never non, Now that I see my lady bryght, Which I have loved with al my myght, Is fro me ded and ys agoon. Allas, deth, what ayleth the, That thou noldest have taken me, Whan thou toke my lady swete, That was so fair, so fresh, so fre, So good that men may wel se Of al goodnesse she had no mete!’

(475–86)

This ‘compleynte’ is a remarkable literary object in its own right, and it seems structured to emphasise the death of the speaker’s lady – something it reveals at the end of the first stanza, in a curious line in which Chaucer scrambles the syntax of two distinct verbal phrases (‘is ded’, ‘and ys fro me agoon’). The effect of letting ‘ded’ fall on the line’s second stress seems to be one of emphasis, while the perturbation in the expected word-order likewise focuses attention on this crucial turning point in the lyric. Commentators have made many different suggestions as to how best to deal with the apparent inconsistency that emerges from the lyric revealing the lady’s death at this point, when the same detail is revealed again at the end of the poem, and I will examine some of these suggestions in a moment. But before doing that I would like to pause to emphasise what strikes me as the peculiar difficulty of this ‘compleynte’ in the Book of the Duchess. The dialogue between the Man in Black and the dreamer that immediately follows this overheard lyric not only makes no reference to its content, it also seems to structure itself around the undisclosed cause of the Man in Black’s sadness as a central mystery. If we put to one side, for a moment, our knowledge of the lyric, it is possible to identify some patterns that emerge in the subsequent dialogue; these seem to suggest that Chaucer is holding in suspension a number of

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different possible explanations for the Man in Black’s grief, whose availability and plausibility make the final, stark revelation of the lady’s death more shocking. The dreamer begins the dialogue by asking the knight to ‘discure me youre woo’ (549) and, more than once in their conversation, the Man in Black himself seems to invite speculation about his condition from the narrator (and presumably, by extension, the reader): he says that Fortune has mistreated him in an allegorical game of chess, then asks, ‘What hast she doo, / Trowest thou?’ (650–1). When there are advances in our understanding of his situation, these are figurative and deliberately open-ended; Fortune, we are told, has taken away his ‘fers’ (or ‘queen’ in chess). When the narrator tries to draw him out of the depths of suicidal despair to which he has been driven by the absence of his ‘fers’, he lists as cautionary exempla despairing lovers who turned to murder or self-murder: Medea, Phyllis, Dido, Sampson, and Echo (lines 726–41) – all betrayed or refused in love, with the implication, perhaps, that this is how we should read the Man in Black’s situation.31 The Man in Black protests repeatedly that the dreamer has not understood what he is trying to tell him (lines 743–4; 1137–8; 1305–6), but later he himself says that only ‘fooles’ would imagine that his lady’s eyes betoken mercy (lines 866–7), which again raises the possibility that his problem stems from betrayal, refusal, or hostility. It seems to be in response to this that the dreamer asks a series of more direct questions about the Man in Black’s relationship: ‘Nyl she not love yow?’ (line 1140); ‘have ye oght doon amys, / That she hath left yow?’ (1141–2). One of the functions of the dreamer in the course of this dialogue seems to be to remind the reader that the cause of the Man in Black’s grief remains an object of enquiry, but both speakers raise various interpretative possibilities, all of which are collapsed in the poem’s final lines when the Man in Black finally grants, in blunt language, the piece of information the narrator is searching for: ‘She ys ded!’ (1309). The point of the foregoing account of the dialogue between the Dreamer and the Man in Black is to show that it is possible to imagine a very satisfying reading of the poem as a work that deliberately postpones the revelation of a terrible truth, and in so doing makes use of a number of narrative feints to imply a range of possibilities that are then frustrated in the starkest terms. But this satisfying reading does not seem to be available, because, as we have already seen, the reason for the Man in Black’s grief is explicitly stated at the moment at which the dreamer first encounters him, overheard in the form of a lyrical complaint. In the Knight’s Tale, when Palamon overhears the disguised Arcite complain about his love for Emelye, he feels a ‘coold swerd’ of realisation slide through his heart (CT I, 1575). Why does the narrator of the Book of the Duchess not experience something similar?

31

David Aers, ‘Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: An Art to Consume Art’, Durham University Journal NS 38 (=69) (1976–77), 201–5 (at p. 204).



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  149

Scholars have struggled to get to grips with this fundamental inconsistency or paradox in the poem, and some of the most egregious examples of what Spearing has criticised as ‘narrator readings’ appeal to the unstated processes of the mind of the narrator to resolve the problem: the narrator is discreet, or stupid, or even forgetful.32 Of all the readings to suggest that we should intuit an implicit response on the part of the narrator, the most compelling are those that suggest that the narrator hears the complaint as a fiction or as a piece of lyric conventionality.33 The lyric is thus seen to reflect the poem’s wider concerns with the limitations of literature or conventional language in the face of death.34 I want to return to this idea later, but first I will look at Spearing’s attempt to do away altogether with a reading based on the narrator’s response, rejecting an interpretation he himself had put forward in an earlier study.35 Although I am going to disagree with Spearing’s conclusion, it is only in response to his attempts to break this critical impasse that I have been able to arrive at my own view of this passage, and his reading demands close attention. Spearing argues that the narrator reports the Man in Black’s overheard comments on his lady’s death because the narrator is the only available conduit for the action of this homodiegetic or ‘first-person’ narrative.36 The lyric says what it does because ‘the book’s readers need to know from the 32

33

34

35 36

A number of critical responses are usefully summarised in Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, pp. 53–5. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, p. 157, suggests that the recognition of this crux as such seems to have begun with Kittredge. Kittredge first discusses the narrator’s ‘misunderstanding’ of the lyric in Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1915), p. 50. W. H. French, ‘The Man in Black’s Lyric’, JEGP 56 (1957), 231–41 (at pp. 236–7); Aers, ‘Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, p. 202; Steven Davis, ‘Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, and the Chaucer Tradition’, ChR 36/4 (2002), 391–405 (at p. 398); Travis, ‘White’, p. 7; A. C. Spearing, ‘Literal and Figurative in The Book of the Duchess’, in SAC, Proceedings No. 1, 1984, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, TN, 1984), 165–71 (at pp. 169–70). Aers, ‘Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, p. 205; Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 33–60 (at pp. 53–4). For a useful reading of the poem’s interest in the failure of communication, see Andrew Lynch, ‘“Taking Keep” of the Book of the Duchess’, in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 167–78. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, pp. 154–7; compare his earlier ‘Literal and Figurative’, pp. 169–70. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, p. 156. For a definition of ‘homodiegetic’ (a ‘first-person’ narrative in which the narrator participates in the action) and ‘heterodiegetic’ (a ‘thirdperson’ narrative related by a narrator who does not participate in the action), see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1980), p. 245. While these have become the accepted definitions of the terms, Genette uses them inconsistently, and in an untranslated part of the French original of this collection of studies (Figures II: Essais [Paris, 1969], p. 202), the same words mean something quite different: ‘homodiegetic’ is used to refer to a narrative that deals with a single story, while ‘heterodiegetic’ is used to refer to a narrative that contains multiple stories, or stories within stories.

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beginning the cause of the knight’s sorrow’.37 It raises no problems for how we read the narrator’s understanding of the events, because the ‘subject of narration is not a self, and such inconsistencies are not evidence of narratorial shortcomings devised as part of the meaning of the poem’.38 I am persuaded completely by the principles that underlie this interpretation, yet I have difficulties with the alternative reading that is presented. For while Spearing is quite right to exorcise the spectre of the psychologised narrator who has been summoned up for so many over-ingenious readings, to say that there is simply no problem to be sensed in this scene, that there is no dissonance between the Man in Black’s complaint and the structure into which it is inserted, is again to smooth over a difficulty that seems to me, at last, unanswerable. The disjuncture between the lyric and the narrative structure that contains it has to be recognised as a profound interpretative problem. There is no need to imagine the representation of a continuous, fallible, narratorial consciousness in order to accept that we should be surprised when the I of the poem pursues a line of questioning designed to ‘discover’ an unknown truth that has already been revealed. The scene is problematic not because of the status of the imagined being relating the information to us, but because of the mechanics of narration: it is not uncommon for medieval narratives to achieve their effect by postponing the revelation of some piece of information that in some way retrospectively alters our understanding of what has gone before – the death of Guillaume de Lorris in the Rose, the agedness of Amans in the Confessio Amantis, Bertilak’s identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In none of these cases can we argue that the audience ‘needs to know’ that element of the narrative whose revelation is deliberately deferred. To say that the Man in Black’s lyric is simply part of the poem’s atmospheric texture is to sidestep the very real dissonance that other scholars have attempted to resolve through appeals to the narrator’s unstated mental processes. But accepting that there is some internal interpretative problem here takes us only so far; by thinking about how the Book of the Duchess relates to the traditions that nourished it, we get a sense that the difficulty of this moment is even deeper and more troubling than it might at first seem, and a consideration of the cultural conditions that led Chaucer to produce this strange and destabilising moment helps us imagine what some of its implications might be. Ardis Butterfield has shown that when the poem’s lyric insertions are read against the wider tradition of French lyric and elegiac writing, the strangeness of this ‘central lacuna’ of a seemingly mis-heard lyric becomes more striking.39 This strangeness or exceptionality can be well illustrated by turning to the very analogues adduced by those scholars who argue that 37 38 39

Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, p. 156. Ibid., p. 157. Robert Jordan advances a similar reading, Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader, pp. 63–5. Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy’, pp. 34, 37.



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  151

the narrator ‘misunderstands’ the Man in Black’s lyric as a piece of courtly conventionality. The strongest parallel along these lines, first suggested by W. H. French, is Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, in which the narrator’s lady asks him to recite a lay that has made its way into her possession. But the lay is a lyric that the narrator himself has written, and it is privately addressed to this very lady; when she asks who wrote it, he is too afraid to tell her that it was him. If he had said ‘Je le fis’ (‘I made it’, line 720), she would discover his love for her.40 So, the argument goes, we might imagine that Chaucer’s narrator thinks the Man in Black is reciting a song he did not compose, just as the lady of the Remede must imagine the narrator’s lay to be written by some other lyric poet. Another parallel has been adduced from Chaucer’s own writings. In the Franklin’s Tale, Aurelius is said to be afraid to tell Dorigen about his love for her, ‘Save in his songes somwhat wolde he wreye / His wo, as in a general compleynyng; / He seyde he lovede and was biloved no thyng’ (CT V, 944–6).41 But while this describes very well something like the scene depicted in the Remede de Fortune, and indeed characterises what the overall structure of the Book of the Duchess seems to demand from the Man in Black’s complaint – a ‘general compleynyng’ about love – this is not what we get. Rather than generalities, in its direct statement of his lady’s death, the Man in Black’s complaint seems to contain an unusual particularity. For while it is certainly true that the conventional language of love might refer to the lover’s desire for death or closeness to death (as the Man in Black’s own later speech will reveal),42 and while there are certainly lyric elegies that lament the death of a particular person,43 lyrics in which a speaker laments the death of his or her own beloved are in fact extremely uncommon in fourteenth-century France and England. Although there are examples of such songs (Machaut’s third motet, his Lay de plour, a lyric in the late fourteenth-century Chantilly Codex, a complaint by Oton de Granson, and no doubt others),44 it is not accurate to call the Man in Black’s complaint against 40

41 42 43

44

This parallel is adduced in French, ‘The Man in Black’s Lyric’, pp. 237–8; Davis, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, p. 398. See also Sturm-Maddox’s consideration of this parallel, in this volume. French, ‘The Man in Black’s Lyric’, p. 238. Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy’, p. 52. See, for example, the lyrics sung to lament the death of Guillaume of Hainault by the allegorical figures of Jehan de Le Mote’s Li Regret Guillaume, discussed usefully by Butterfield in ‘Lyric and Elegy’, pp. 39–40. Deschamps writes several lyric elegies, most famously for Machaut, but also for other figures – see Oeuvres complètes, ed. Le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hillaire and Gaston Raynaud, 11 vols, Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1878–1903); the Machaut elegies appear at vol. 1, pp. 243–6; see also vol. 3, pp. 259–60. Motet 3 and the Lay de plour appear in Machaut, Poésies lyriques, ed. Vladimir Chichmaref, 2 vols (Paris, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 487–8, 459–66. Note that the latter example is actually in the voice of a lady lamenting the death of her lover, and considerable space is devoted to framing this situation (lines 1–104) before the complaint proper begins. This piece appears in some manuscripts immediately after the Jugement de Roy de Navarre, and seems to

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his lady’s death ‘utterly commonplace’, or even ‘conventional’,45 when the handful of surviving lyrics of this kind are dwarfed by the vast body of love lyrics that express the more familiar emotions of pain at separation and fear of refusal. It is also worth noting that when Christine de Pizan and Charles d’Orléans write lyrics lamenting the death of their beloveds – at the end of the fourteenth century and early in the fifteenth century, respectively – the death lamented by the lyric voice corresponds to the actual, historical death of a husband or wife (just as there are actual, historical deaths behind the more famous lovers’ lyric elegies of Dante and Petrarch).46 This is all suggestive for thinking about the actual, historical death of John of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche of Lancaster, an event that lies behind the Book of the Duchess and to which I will return towards the end of this essay. What, then, can be said about the Man in Black’s strangely dissonant complaint? As a dit featuring lyric insertion, the Book of the Duchess participates in a tradition that not only makes use of lyric and narrative but also engages in an exploration of how lyric and narrative interact. Elsewhere I have argued that, even if we must be cautious about accepting a priori, transhistorical features of what ‘the lyric’ is or should be, medieval writers had something like an ‘idea of the lyric’ – an idea that was complex and shifting.47 One key aspect of the ‘idea of the lyric’ that we find in Machaut

45 46

47

answer the demand for a lay that occurs at the end of that poem. There is therefore an especially strong fictional framework for this particular example of a lover’s elegy; see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, pp. 365–6. The Chantilly Codex lyric, ‘Onques Jacob por la belle Rachel’, attributed to Jean Vaillant, can be seen on fol 27r of the facsimile of Codex Chantilly: Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, MS 564, ed. Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone, 2 vols, Épitome musical (Turnhout, 2008). For Vaillant, see Wilkins, ‘The Post-Machaut Generation of Poet-Musicians’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 12 (1968), 40–84 (at p. 61). The voice of Oton de Granson’s ‘Complainte de Saint Vallentin Garenson’ also mourns the death of his lady; see Granson, Poésies, ed. Joan Grenier-Winther, Classiques français du Moyen Âge 162 (Paris, 2010), pp. 368–79, lines 33–40. Poirion briefly discusses the theme of death in late medieval love lyric in Le Poète et le prince, pp. 551–2; note, however, that the example adduced from Deschamps (Oeuvres, vol. 4, pp. 196–7) laments the death of a lady without actually suggesting that she was loved by the voice of the poem. Aers, ‘Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, p. 202; Travis, ‘White’, p. 7. See, for example, Christine de Pizan, Cent Ballades, ballades 9 and 11, but note the curious comments on voice at ballade 50 (the text appears in Œuvres Poétiques, ed. Maurice Roy, 3 vols, Société des anciens textes français [Paris, 1886–96], pp. 1–100). Christine’s husband, Etienne de Castel, seems to have died in 1389. Charles d’Orléans (who imitates Christine’s Cent Ballades 11 in his English poems, Fortunes Stabilnes, lines 2054–81) writes several lyrics mourning the death of his lady; see, for example, Ballade 57 (in Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion, 2 vols, Classiques français du Moyen Âge 34, 56 [Paris, 1923–27] – his English version of this appears as lines 1994–2025 of Fortunes Stabilnes (ed. Mary-Jo Arn [Binghamton, NY, 1994]). Charles’s second wife, Bonne d’Armagnac, died in the 1430s while Charles was imprisoned in England. Knox, ‘Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal’, New Medieval Literatures 16 (2016), 213–49 (at pp. 213–37). I have drawn much from John Burrow’s insightful article ‘The Poet and the Book’,



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  153

was that lyric or song was by necessity derived from sentement – the direct emotional experience of love.48 In Machaut’s Remede de Fortune we find an archetypal statement of the idea: he who does not write with sentement (‘de sentement ne fait’) counterfeits his work and his song (‘son ouevre et son chant contrefait’, lines 407–8). The narrators of the dits variously lay claim to or disavow this commodity, even as the very notion of sentement comes under pressure or is ironised in various ways. In the curiously blurred identities of the narrator and the knight in the Fonteinne Amoureuse, for example, placing the lyric love complaint in the mouth of the knight explicitly asserts (but implicitly undermines) the dependence of lyric on sentement: the lyric emerges from the knight’s real experience of love and a particular situation of love-separation (and yet the lyric, we must assume, is written by Machaut). Chaucer relates ‘sentement’ to his writing in a narrative context (Troilus and Criseyde 2.13), and in the Book of the Duchess we find a similar idea evoked in the specific context of lyric (the Man in Black later says that he made songs ‘Of my felynge’, line 1172). I have been trying to argue that, in the Book of the Duchess, the Man in Black’s complaint simply does not fit into the fiction that Chaucer has produced – it ruptures the surface of the narrative, and although it is presented as an event or a performance within that narrative, it stands outside it. It occupies its own temporality. But in some way it also refers to something outside the world of the poem, to the historical death of John of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche of Lancaster. Whether Gaunt somehow commissioned the Book of the Duchess, or whether it represents Chaucer’s own speculative venture, there is no doubt that Gaunt is present in the poem in a complex and refracted way – partly, if not entirely, through the figure of the Man in Black.49 Since the Man in Black is in some way a cipher for the actually bereaved John of Gaunt, his complaint is in a certain sense more true than

48

49

in Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Perugia, 1986, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen, 1986), pp. 230–45. The tension between lyric theory and lyric history emerges as an important theme in Culler’s Theory of the Lyric, pp. 49–76. For an important overview of the imaginative association of song with emotion, see Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Theory of Passionate Song’, in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 231–51 (esp. pp. 238–9). For sentement and secular love lyrics see Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp. 197–200; Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Lover-Poet and Love as the Most Pleasing “Matere” in Medieval French Love Poetry’, Modern Language Review 83 (1988), 820–42; Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY, 2011), pp. 123–31. The term is usefully discussed in relation to the Book of the Duchess in Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy’, pp. 35, 46. Helen Cooper presents a sophisticated reading of the multiple ways in which different aspects of John of Gaunt’s public and private attitudes might be sensed in the poem; ‘Chaucerian Poetics’, in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 31–50 (at pp. 44–5).

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any ‘general compleynyng’ of woe in love: in this lyric, the expression of an extra-textual aristocratic sentement might be seen as supremely direct, irresistibly expressing the reality of the death whose revelation the narrative is structured to postpone. It is as if the confrontation with grief at death has entered into the poem at the wrong point, as if it has overrun the literary vehicle that has been created to house and slowly unveil it. But if the inserted lyric speaks some kind of emotional truth that bores through the fiction of the dream poem, the inserted lyric remains (we must assume) Chaucer’s, and this hole in the narrative through which John of Gaunt’s mourning enters the text is, inevitably, artificial, an act of ventriloquism with which Chaucer tries to articulate a response to death not just as if he was the Man in Black, but as if he was John of Gaunt. Helen Cooper has drawn out the implications of these ideas with her powerful observation that, in some fundamental way, the Man in Black is Chaucer:50 this remains true whether we read him as a mental figment produced within the dreamer’s mind or a textual fiction produced within Chaucer’s poem. The I of the complaint does not belong to the Man in Black any more than the I of the reanimated Ceyx belongs to the dead king. But the implications of this spill out to colour other parts of the poem: by the same token, the I that occupies the first syllable of the Book of the Duchess, and which later claims to have made the book we are reading, is a confection, partially coinciding with and partially alienated from the historical Geoffrey Chaucer. It has been pointed out that the Book of the Duchess is probably the first narrative poem in English to begin with the pronoun I, yet its opening lines are a direct imitation of the opening lines of Froissart’s Paradys d’Amour, probably the first narrative poem in French to begin with the pronoun je.51 What seems to be a remarkable insistence on the presence of the first-person subject at the beginning of Chaucer’s poem recedes at once into the world of citation. This relates, I think, to what emerges from the dissonance of the Man in Black’s song: a sense that Chaucer recognised something inherently problematic both in speaking for another and speaking for oneself. Paul Zumthor famously argued that medieval lyric should be read as a closed system in which the je refers to nothing except itself as a linguistic sign.52 We find something rather different in the Book of the Duchess: this poem reveals Chaucer struggling with the question of how we get inside language, how we inhabit a system shaped by poetic traditions that demand immediate emotional directness even as they abstract the poem away from the world of personal experience. 50 51 52

Ibid., p. 43. Butterfield, ‘Chaucer’s French Inheritance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 20–35 (at p. 28). Zumthor, ‘De la circularité du chant (à propos des trouvères des XIIe et XIIIe siècles)’, Poétique 2 (1970), 129–40 (at p. 139), and Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972), p. 192.



Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess  155

Morpheus’s ventriloquism of Ceyx and Chaucer’s ventriloquism of the Man in Black are motivated by a cluster of ideas: presence, absence, voice, and death. All of these ideas occur with unique force in the scene from the Roman de la rose examined earlier, and it seems that, even if Chaucer is experimenting with techniques whose most proximate source is Machaut, the Rose is what underlies the most severe tensions and problems that can be sensed in the Book of the Duchess. When the Man in Black attempts to evoke the speech of his deceased lady in language, he admits to encountering a barrier: ‘I kan not wel counterfete / Hir wordes’ (1241–2). But even in claiming that death has made his lady’s voice inaccessible, the Man in Black reveals how his own voice is something summoned up by Chaucer in an act of counterfeiting – the term evokes Machaut’s claim in the Remede de Fortune that a poet will ‘counterfeit’ his song if he attempts to write without ‘sentement’. Since the Man in Black’s feelings and experiences are not Chaucer’s own, his words become by necessity a kind of ‘counterfeiting’ – no more or less mediated and artificial than the voice of someone who has passed into the absolute absence of death. The implications of this seem rather profound, and Chaucer here comes close to the grim implications of Jean de Meun’s comic self-revelatory elegy for love poets: to write as an I, perhaps in particular a poetic I (whether that I represents another or some version of oneself), is to produce a trace that will outlive the writer, to begin to confront one’s own future absence, something much more terrible than the semantic ‘emptiness’ of the word I itself. The immediacy, transparency, and intelligibility in the self-present voice that Chaucer depicts when Juno’s messenger announces himself to Morpheus (‘Hyt am I’), reveal the extent to which Chaucer himself is involved in a much more problematic process, an act of writing that necessitates his own distance from the text and evokes the possibility of his own absence from the world of intelligibility altogether. This is not quite the same as saying, ‘I am means therefore originarily I am mortal’,53 but it comes close: if the self-present voice is a guarantee of being it is also a promise of eventual non-being. These ideas crystallise around the uncanniness of writing itself, and some medieval thinkers seem to have been alert to this. In a remarkable phrase found in a twelfth-century cartulary, cited by Spearing from Michael Clanchy’s study of the development of literacy in the later Middle Ages: ‘when the voice has perished with the man, writing still enlightens posterity’.54

53

54

Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston, IL, 2011), p. 46. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993), p. 254; cf. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, p. 10. A similar account of the relationship of writing to the transience of human life appears in an eleventh-century charter issued by the bishop of Thérouanne; cf. Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Bertin, ed. M. Guérard,

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Chaucer’s exploration of the troubling points of contact between voice and identity in the Book of the Duchess finds no precise parallels in thirteenth- or fourteenth-century French poetry, but it does reveal his use of the remarkable resources of thought made available to him by that tradition. A sensitivity to these resources does not resolve the difficulties of the Book of the Duchess; if anything, it only heightens the sense that this is a work that is straining under serious tensions, even though it can seem at times so whole and so finished. These are the tensions that Chaucer himself must have experienced as he tried to occupy a position in relation to a literary tradition, a position in relation to a powerful political leader, a position in language, and, finally, a position in relation to death.

Collection de cartulaires de France 3 (Paris, 1840), pp. 192–3. I am very grateful to Jill Mann for passing on this reference, and for allowing me to read an unpublished paper on the Book of the Duchess that has influenced my thinking here.

8 ‘Counterfeit’ Imitatio: Understanding the Poet–Patron Relationship in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess* ELIZAVETA STRAKHOV

As is well known, Chaucer’s rendition of the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone in the frame-tale of The Book of the Duchess departs from its sources in a small, but significant, detail with respect to the role of Morpheus. Guillaume de Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse, a known central source for the Duchess, has Morpheus adopt Ceyx’s shape as a simulacrum, as happens in Machaut’s sources (Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Ovide moralisé).1 Chaucer, on the other hand, has Morpheus go to the sea in which Ceyx has been drowned, ‘take up Seys body the kyng, / That lyeth ful pale and nothyng rody / … [and] crepe into the body / And doo hit goon to Alcione’ (BD 142–5). Instead of merely looking like Ceyx, Morpheus reanimates Ceyx’s dead corpse to ferry the message of his death to Alcyone. Chaucer further emphasizes his curious departure from his sources by reiterating it some lines later: Morpheus ‘[t]ook up the dreynte body sone / And bar hyt forth to Alcione’ (195–6). Furthermore, Ceyx’s body, controlled from inside by Morpheus, speaks before Alcyone’s bed while she sleeps, rather than from inside her dream as in Chaucer’s sources.2 Chaucer thus insists on adding an uncomfortable authenticity to the scene: instead of hearing an image in a dream, Alcyone hears her actual *

This article owes its shape – and a debt of gratitude – to the rich feedback I received on earlier versions delivered at the 51st International Congress of Medieval Studies at the University of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo, the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the Midwest Middle English Reading Group at Northwestern University in Evanston, the Affairs of the Heart: Medieval Cardiologies Symposium at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, as well as to Jamie Fumo’s excellent suggestions in the editing process.

1

On Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse as a main source for Chaucer’s Duchess see, in particular, James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Background of the Book of the Duchess (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), pp. 107, 112–17. Compare Rebecca Davis’s discussion, in this volume, of the challenges this reanimation poses to conceptions of mind and body in the context of sleep.

2

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husband communicate with her, but, rather than merely looking like Ceyx, he is being awkwardly reanimated and manipulated from the inside out. The differences in Machaut’s and Chaucer’s treatment of Morpheus’ role in the Ceyx and Alcyone tale extend to that tale’s subsequent relationship to the larger plot of both works. In the Fonteinne, the Ceyx and Alcyone story is rendered within a complainte spoken aloud by a lovesick nobleman, which the text’s protagonist, Guillaume, overhears and copies down verbatim. Later, he presents this perfect rendition of the nobleman’s words to him and garners the prince’s favor, friendship, and, most importantly, his patronage. As an anagram in the Fonteinne reveals, moreover, the nobleman in question represents Machaut’s real-life patron John of Berry.3 In the Book of the Duchess, however, no immediate understanding prevails: as in the Fonteinne, the protagonist overhears a young nobleman voice his sorrow, but he is thoroughly bewildered by it and spends the rest of the work attempting to uncover the source of the nobleman’s grief, with often comical misunderstandings. Here the nobleman seems to be John of Gaunt, as indicated by his home being a ‘long castel with walles white / … on a ryche hil’ (1318–19), but the reference is far less explicit than in the Fonteinne.4 Both works seem to be positing the same structural similarity between their version of the Ceyx and Alcyone tale and the subsequent interaction between protagonist and nobleman. Much as Machaut’s Morpheus perfectly reproduces Ceyx’s likeness, Machaut’s protagonist perfectly reproduces another person’s words. Chaucer’s Morpheus, however, seems instead uncomfortably to inhabit Ceyx’s dead body, while Chaucer’s Dreamer seems able to reproduce verbatim the Black Knight’s lament yet bafflingly unable, or unwilling, to grasp the fact of his bereavement. As this comparison of the major plot points of the Fonteinne and the Duchess makes clear, whatever else the Duchess is trying to do, it seems to have a kind of dialectical relationship to the Fonteinne. That this dialectical relationship indeed exists and, moreover, holds the key to explicating some of the Duchess’ more confounding aspects in its portrayal of the Dreamer and the Black Knight is the central premise of this piece. The whole Duchess seems to be governed by the idea of replication and reproduction writ large. Both Chaucer’s Dreamer and the Black Knight repeatedly express dread before the very idea of reproduction lest it be flawed. When the Dreamer first wakes into his dream, he hears a chorus of birds and notes that ‘ther was noon of hem that feyned / To synge’ (317–18). In his torrent of invective addressing Fortune, the Black Knight argues that she is an ‘ydole of fals portrayture’ for her capacity to ‘sone wrien’ (626–7). By contrast, the gaze of his beloved ‘nas no countrefeted thyng’ (869). Her speech contains no flattery and is but ‘purely hir symple record / … as trewe 3 4

Guillaume de Machaut, Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner, 3 vols, Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1908–21), vol. 3, p. xxvi. See Explanatory Notes to lines 1314–29 in Riverside Chaucer, p. 976.



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as any bond / Or trouthe of any mannes hond’ (934–6). Indeed, the Knight admits he cannot ‘counterfete’ his beloved’s words (1241) in attempting to speak of her. This anxiety before the counterfeit dovetails with Morpheus’ being a figure who precisely does not counterfeit Ceyx’s body but cumbersomely hauls it across land and sea, crawls into it, and makes it stand and speak at the foot of Alcyone’s bed. In the Duchess, Chaucer seems resistant to the very process that Machaut’s Fonteinne celebrates: making felicitously verbatim copies of originals. Chaucer’s emphasis on Morpheus’ troubling ventriloquism speaks to another kind of reproduction occurring on a larger structural level in the Duchess: its transmission of its Latin and French predecessors and contemporaries in a veritable patchwork of passages, direct quotations, and allusions. In addition to its use of an Ovidian tale and of the Fonteinne, over half of the Duchess draws on Machaut’s Jugement du roi de Behaingne (before 1342) and Remede de Fortune (c. 1340) and on Jean Froissart’s Paradys d’amour (1361–62) and Le Dit du Bleu Chevalier (1364).5 Consequently, scholars have read the Duchess, and the figure of Morpheus in particular, as reflecting on the processes of intertextuality itself.6 In what follows, I suggest that Chaucer uses the figure of Morpheus to explore a specific feature of intertextuality, namely the rhetorical concept of imitatio. Chaucer’s exploration occurs in direct response to Machaut’s similar investigations, using his Morpheus, in the Fonteinne. Both authors deploy Morpheus to reflect on the advantages and limitations of imitatio as a tool for authorial self-promotion. Machaut’s Fonteinne posits a fantasy, articulated first and foremost on the level of plot, that the exact replication of another poet’s work is not only possible but enticing because it assures the development of a mutually beneficial poet–patron relationship, necessary to establish poetic fame. Machaut’s Morpheus and his replication of Ceyx’s image, I claim, constitute an overdetermined moment for the Fonteinne that showcases the processes of imitatio and figures their significance for

5

6

See Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets. Wimsatt takes Froissart’s Bleu Chevalier to have been written after and thus inspired by the Duchess, but, as Susan Crane shows, Bleu Chevalier precedes Chaucer’s work: ‘Froissart’s Dit dou Bleu Chevalier as a Source for Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 61/1 (1992), 59–74. See, for example, Piero Boitani, ‘Old Books Brought to Life in Dreams: the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls’, in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 58–77; Nancy Ciccone, ‘The Chamber, the Man in Black, and the Structure of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, ChR 44/2 (2009), 205–23; Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 23–4. See also A. J. Minnis, ‘A Note on Chaucer and the Ovide moralisé’, Medium Ævum 48/2 (1979), 254–7, and Helen Phillips, ‘Fortune and the Lady: Machaut, Chaucer, and the Intertextual “Dit”’, Nottingham French Studies 38/2 (1999), 120–36, and ‘Structure and Consolation in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 16/2 (Fall 1981), 107–18.

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Machaut’s text. Chaucer’s Duchess is a response to Machaut’s Fonteinne that systematically repudiates Machaut’s claims concerning the desirability and viability of verbatim imitatio. Chaucer’s comedically dysfunctional interactions between the Dreamer and the Knight parody the fantasy of perfect understanding between poet and patron that bloomed in Machaut’s Fonteinne. For this reason, just as Machaut’s Morpheus reifies the capacity for perfect imitatio in his intradiegetic actions, Chaucer’s Morpheus reifies the awkward difficulty of imitatio in his unpleasant puppetry. Chaucer’s rejection of the happy poet–patron model in his Duchess – a text that is far more ambiguously occasional than Machaut’s Fonteinne – suggests a concomitant rejection of the poet–patron model as an institution that could ensure one’s claims to literary posterity. Eschewing Machaut’s verbatim imitatio between poets and patrons, Chaucer uses his Morpheus to figure the processes of imitating instead one’s literary predecessors as the means by which literary fame is to be established. Chaucer suggests that poetic legacy is ensured not through sociocultural coterie networks but by reviewing and carefully taxonomizing one’s relationship to one’s literary predecessors. In so doing, he offers an alternative model for authorial self-definition as dependent on one’s relationship not to the literary present but to the past.

Classical Theories of Imitatio A brief glance at some of the major classical and late antique discussions of imitatio suggests that the distinction between verbatim and developmental replicative models occupied the very heart of the praxis in the discipline of rhetoric. Whether or not these discussions were known to Machaut and Chaucer either directly (the ubiquity of Horace, for example, in the late Middle Ages is well established), via intermediaries, or filtered down more generally through the medieval classroom, they help articulate a useful theoretical framework for approaching the difference in how Machaut and Chaucer represent the workings of imitatio in their respective texts.7 Horace warned against following one’s models too closely lest one fall into mere verbatim replication, famously writing in the Ars poetica:

7

See Rita Copeland, ‘Horace’s Ars Poetica in the Medieval Classroom and Beyond: The Horizons of Ancient Precept’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus, OH, 2013), pp. 15–33, and Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991); Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus, OH, 2010); Carol Dana Lanham, ed., Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice (London, 2003).



The Poet-Patron Relationship in Chaucer and Machaut  161 A body of material that is open to all will become your own legal property if you do not repeatedly circle around the wide pathway all may tread or make it your business as a faithful translator to render word for word or to jump slavishly into a tight spot from which shame or the laws of your chosen work forbid you to set foot. (132–6)8

Horace suggests that a poet succeeds when he sets out on the road less traveled and will truly possess his material when he does more than simply reiterate it. In The Orator’s Education, Quintilian similarly advises against mere replication, citing its impossibility: [I]t is generally easier to improve on something than simply to repeat it. Total similarity is so difficult to achieve that even Nature herself has failed to prevent things which seem to match and resemble each other most closely from being always distinguishable in some respect. Again, whatever resembles another object is bound to be less than what it imitates, just as the shadow is less than the body, the picture less than the face, and the actor’s performance less than the emotions of real life. (10.2.10–11)9

According to Quintilian, exact imitation is to be avoided because it is not only largely impossible but, even if achievable, deficient, for it is, like shadows to bodies, pictures to objects, and performances to real-life events, inherently less authentic than its original. In discussing imitation in the eighty-fourth of his Moral Epistles, Seneca offers a practice of representation that consciously transcends replication: ‘I would have you resemble him as a child resembles his father, and not as a picture resembles its original; for a picture is a lifeless thing’ (84.8).10 In deploying this filial metaphor, Seneca advocates for general and developmental, rather than exact, resemblance. As Thomas Greene notes, [t]he preference for the filial over the painterly relationship seems to rest on the former’s organicity … There is also in this filial analogy … an understood element of unlikeness. The painting is contrived to reproduce its subject as faithfully as possible, but the son is allowed to recall his father’s features with only a vague ‘family resemblance’.11

In this way, Seneca emphasizes that imitatio is about inheritance and literary legacy, rather than simultaneous reproduction. As Greene summarizes it in a 8 9 10 11

Quotations from Horace, Satires and Epistles, ed. Robert Cowan, trans. John Davie (Oxford, 2011), by line number. Quotations from Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, Volume IV: Books 9–10, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA, 2002). Quotations from Seneca, Epistles: Volume II: Epistles 66–92, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA, 1920). Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), p. 75. Cf. Copeland, Rhetoric, p. 27.

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discussion of this passage, ‘to imitate creatively is to assume the historicity of one’s own particular place and moment and idiom’.12 Good imitatio, for Seneca, is a process of creating literary history by casting oneself as a branch in an authorial genealogy and thus transmitting the past diachronically to one’s posterity, rather than engaging in synchronic transmissions.13 Centuries later, John of Salisbury evinces a similar vision of the uses of imitatio in his Metalogicon (1159), in an anecdote concerning Bernard of Chartres’ classroom pedagogy: He [Bernard] would also explain the poets and orators who were to serve as models for the boys in their introductory exercises in imitating prose and poetry … And if, to embellish his work, someone had sewed on a patch of cloth filched from an external source, Bernard, on discovering this, would rebuke him for his plagiary, but would generally refrain from punishing him. After he had reproved the student … he would, with modest indulgence, bid the boy to rise to real imitation of the [classical authors] and would bring about that he who had imitated his predecessors would come to be deserving of imitation by his successors.

Here Bernard, in John of Salisbury’s relation, openly repudiates verbatim repetition of sources as an intellectual theft that is beneath true imitation. Yet the latter, properly practiced, has the capacity to make the imitator the future imitated. Good imitatio, in other words, places its practitioner within a literary pantheon. As this brief overview suggests, the question of what constitutes effective imitatio occurs in a variety of sources, certain of them, like Horace, broadly available to late medieval audiences and others, like John of Salisbury, likely known to Machaut and Chaucer directly or through later commentaries. That similar definitions of verbatim versus replicative imitatio are reiterated across centuries suggests an accumulated body of critical thought surrounding the relationship between imitatio and authorial endeavor. Thinking through the pre-existing collocation of imitatio with authorial self-articulation highlights what is at stake in the exercises in imitatio between poet and potential patron in Machaut’s Fonteinne and Chaucer’s Duchess. As we are about to see, Machaut’s Fonteinne subsumes the concerns over verbatim imitatio by demonstrating its centrality to securing patronage, which elevates the poet to prominence and to a new type of collaborative project with a patron that ultimately can transcend mere replication. Chaucer’s understanding of

12 13

Greene, Light in Troy, p. 47. See further Richard McKeon, ‘Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity’, Modern Philology 34/1 (1936), 1–35; G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 33/1 (1980), 1–32; and Jan Ziolkowski, ‘The Highest Form of Compliment: Imitatio in Medieval Latin Culture’, in Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke, ed. John Marenbon (Leiden, 2001), pp. 293–305.



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imitatio, meanwhile, tracks more closely with the definitions of Horace, Quintilian, Seneca, and John of Salisbury, for whom imitatio pertains purely to constructing careful relationships with the literary past. In this way, both authors offer startlingly opposed meditations on the preconditions for poetic legacy.

Verbatim Imitatio in Machaut’s Fonteinne Machaut’s Fonteinne suggests that the verbatim imitatio of texts can be a fundamentally rewarding endeavor ensuring poetic success through the promise of socioeconomic security and joint authorial collaboration. The text opens with a sleepless narrator overhearing a man next door lamenting his unrequited love in the form of a complainte, and it is here that we find Machaut’s rendition of the Ceyx and Alcyone tale. Impressed with the invisible speaker’s eloquence (the complainte ultimately lasts 50 stanzas and features 100 individual rhymes), the narrator decides to copy the complainte down on parchment. This scene sets the stage for the subsequent interaction between the protagonist and the unnamed man, who is revealed to be a nobleman (John of Berry). When the narrator and the nobleman meet the next day, the nobleman confides his love-pangs and gives his new friend a poetic commission: ‘vueilliez estudier / Que de m’amour et de ma plainte / Me faciés ou lay ou complainte’ [please consider composing / A lay or complaint for me / About my love and sorrow] (1501–3).14 However, instead of composing his own poem as per this commission, the narrator pulls out his transcription of the nobleman’s lyric lament with the words: ‘Sire, vostre requeste / Tenez’ [Lord, take / What you’ve requested] (1519–20). Looking the complainte over, the prince immediately recognizes the words as his own, and ‘[o]nques n’i fist arrest ne doute / Qu’escripte ne fust mot a mot, / Einsi com devisé la m’ot’ [He never halted or questioned / That it hadn’t been copied word for word / Just as he had recited it for me] (1522–4). The nobleman has asked the narrator for an original composition on commission, and the narrator has responded to the ‘requeste’ with a verbatim transcription of the nobleman’s own words. In this moment, the narrator’s own role as poet seems to disappear into the purely scribal.15 14 15

All quotations from Guillaume de Machaut, The Fountain of Love (La Fonteinne Amoureuse) and Two Other Love Vision Poems, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1993). Cf. Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, WI, 1984), p. 200. See also Douglas Kelly, who similarly points out that ‘[t]he specific patron employs the poet much as he or she would a scribe, or as a politician would engage a speech-writer today … The poet as messenger can, accordingly, assume all shapes, like Morphée or Eclimpostair, to whom he is assimilated’: ‘The Genius of the Patron: The Prince, the Poet, and Fourteenth Century Invention’, in Chaucer’s French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of Self and Tradition, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1999), pp. 1–27 (at p. 11).

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In this way, Machaut presents occasional poetry, composed for a poetic patron, as a felicitous form of imitatio, albeit precisely of a kind that Horace, Seneca, and Quintilian might dismiss as overly replicative of its model. In the Fonteinne, however, despite raising questions as to who might be the real author of this complainte – the nobleman who voiced it, or the poet, acting as scribe, who wrote it down – this uncanny moment of imitatio initiates a lasting bond of friendship and patronage. The two leave for a walk and fall fast asleep, the nobleman resting his head in the narrator’s lap, at the base of the Fountain of Love, whereupon the narrator relates a dream-vision in which the nobleman is a character. When both wake up, they learn that they have dreamt the same dream: ‘Car en l’eure nous esveillames / Et tous .ii. un songe songames, / Einsi com nous le nous comptames’ [For we awoke at once, / Having both dreamed the same dream, / Just as we revealed to one another] (2519–21).16 In a way, this dream answers the earlier question as to authorship of the complainte, for its doubled nature suggests that the narrator and the nobleman have joined minds, as if the processes of imitatio extend beyond the parchment and into their very subjectivities. The conjoined dream authorizes them as joint authors of the complainte and further establishes the success of the narrator’s newfound patronage: the work ends with the nobleman, who is departing for England, granting the narrator temporary jurisdiction over his lands and gifting him with jewels, while the narrator pledges service to him (lines 2833–40). Verbatim imitatio, we learn, is the precondition for ensuring a mutually beneficial poet–patron relationship. The poem’s deep investment in the processes of excellent verbatim transmission, in which good communication is assured, and texts and discourses can travel between agents without significant alteration, is prefigured within the overheard complainte by means of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode. Here Morpheus assumes Ceyx’s shape, delivers his message, and ‘einsi vit la belle clerement / Le roy Ceïs et sot certeinnement / La maniere de son trespassement’ [In this way the beautiful woman saw clearly / King Ceys, and knew for certain / The manner of his passing] (683–85). Morpheus ‘passes’ for Ceyx, and Alcyone is convinced of her husband’s death. Morpheus’ ability to transmit Ceyx’s message to Alcyone, by transforming into an image of Ceyx that is, to his own wife, indistinguishable from the original, sets up the Fonteinne’s later assertion that the narrator’s verbatim transcription of the nobleman’s words is a pleasing imitatio leading to patronage. Imitatio’s success in the Fonteinne is structurally replicated, on the metapoetic level, by the poem’s own treatment of its poetic sources. The tale of Ceyx and Alcyone occurs within the complainte, so central to Machaut’s investigation of imitatio, and forms its focus. In so doing, it also importantly 16

Cf. Brownlee, who suggests that ‘[a]s the narrator wrote down the complainte for Amant [i.e. the nobleman] in the first half of the dit, so he dreams the dream for Amant in the second half’ (Poetic Identity, p. 207).



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highlights the ways in which Machaut handles his own poetic sources in a text so concerned with the role of imitatio. Machaut’s sources for the Ceyx and Alcyone episode are Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Ovide moralisé; he is, as we will see, clearly aware of and drawing on both texts. He does not, however, seem much interested in innovating within those sources: in using them, he adheres to the main framework of the Ceyx and Alcyone story without especially engaging with the Ovide moralisé’s main distinguishing feature from Ovid, namely, its extended moralizations of the works.17 Machaut simply seems to mine both for major plot points. Thus, in the Fonteinne, the Ovide moralisé, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Iris is Juno’s messenger (FA 573; OM 11.3452; Met. 11.585); the residence of the God of Sleep is in a valley with a brook (FA 591–3; OM 11.3439, 3451; Met. 11.592, 603), in which no dogs bark or roosters crow (FA 609–10; OM 11.3445–6; Met. 11.597–9); Morpheus is the God of Sleep’s son chosen for this task (FA 651–2; OM 11.3518–30; Met. 11.633–5); and Morpheus assumes the shape of Ceyx (FA 659: ‘fourme’; OM 11.3563: ‘forme’; Met. 11.653: ‘faciem, figura’), who is pale, stripped, and wet (FA 661–4; OM 11.3565–7; Met. 11.654–6).18 Machaut also retains the metamorphoses of Ceyx and Alcyone into kingfishers at the end. A few details suggest Machaut’s primary source to be the Ovide moralisé rather than the Metamorphoses: whereas Ovid has Iris simply brush the dreams aside as she enters the hall of sleep (Met. 11.616–17), in the Ovide she shields herself with her arms against the dreams that rush at her (11.3479–81); Machaut’s detail that Iris is afraid as she enters the hall (FA 602) suggests his reliance on the latter. Furthermore, Machaut’s mention of the God of Sleep’s opening only one eye (FA 632) is in the Ovide (11.3488) but not in Ovid. Machaut also follows the Ovide in having Iris leave the place somnolent and ‘mourne’, or sad (FA 623; OM 11.3511), while in Ovid she is just somnolent (Met. 11.630–1). There are two indications that Machaut has read Ovid’s original as well: he and Ovid have the God of Sleep resting his chin on his chest, while the Ovide says it was drooping to his feet and the floor (FA 607; OM 11.3492–3; Met. 11.619–20), and Machaut follows Ovid, not the Ovide, in noting that Morpheus–Ceyx has matted hair (FA 661–2; Met. 11.656). Machaut’s own innovations are but minor: Iris comes in a cloud rather than a rainbow, which picks up on Ovid’s saying Morpheus’ residence is in a cloud (FA 589; OM 11.3433; Met. 11.591); and all the God of Sleep’s dream children have metamorphic powers, rather 17

18

On the Ovide’s literary project vis-à-vis Ovid, see Ana Pairet, ‘Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The Challenges of the Ovide moralisé’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James Clark, Frank Coulson, and Kathryn McKinley (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 83–107. Citations refer to Ovide moralisé, poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle publié d’après tous les manuscrits connus, ed. C. de Boer, Martina G. de Boer, and Jeanette Th. M. Van’t Sant, 5 vols (Amsterdam, 1915–38; repr. 1966–68), vol. 4; Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford, 2004).

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than just Morpheus and two others (FA 635–50; OM 11.3523–48; Met. 11.633–45). In all, Machaut’s Ceyx and Alcyone episode replicates the text’s own central conceit on the level of plot by performing a very close imitatio of his two sources. This structural similarity between the claims made about imitatio intradiegetically within the poem and the Fonteinne’s own relationship to its literary sources is further reified by two crucial details in the setting of the narrator’s and protagonist’s conjoined dream at the base of the eponymous Fountain of Love. This Fountain is an enameled ivory pillar carved, we are told, by Pygmalion (lines 1395–8): ‘.i. grans piler d’ivoire / … ou l’istoire / De Narcisus fu entaillie / … Sus le marbre de la fonteinne / Venus, Paris, et dame Heleinne / Estoient …’ [A great pillar of ivory / Where the history of Narcissus / Had been depicted … / On the marble of the fountain / Were Venus, Paris, / And Lady Helen] (1307–15). As William Calin notes, the fountain is a miseen-abime for the way the whole Fonteinne is ‘a masterpiece of medieval intertextuality’ in its melding of Ovidian and Trojan matters with references to the fountain of Narcissus in the Roman de la Rose. Significantly, the Rose’s alternative name for Narcissus’ fountain is the ‘Fountain of Love’ (‘fu ceste fontaine apelee / La Fontaine d’Amors’, lines 1594–5), which Machaut’s ‘Fonteinne amoureuse’ surely echoes.19 The conjoined dreaming, enshrining the newfound relationship of patronage between narrator and nobleman, is thus staged at a site that visually renders the Matter of Troy, Ovid, and the Ovidian Rose carved together onto a single ekphrastic object. The different subject matters are, notably, not distinguished from one another within the pillar, but simply brought together, much as Machaut collocated Ovid and the Ovide in his retelling of the Ceyx and Alcyone story without emphasizing their distinguishing features. The detail of the fountain illustrates the stakes of Machaut’s investment in this concept of imitatio, present on multiple structural levels of his text. As Rita Copeland points out, ‘historicity is the most consistent informing perspective on the ideal of imitation’; in other words, the question of imitatio concerns, at its core, the relationships posited between an author and his or her sources.20 In spatially arranging this scene, Machaut has made the Matter of Troy, Ovid, and the Ovidian Rose prop up his mutually dreaming poet and patron, as if these texts, in their conjoined presence on the pillar, similarly bolster the conjoining of minds between the narrator and the nobleman. Machaut’s series of structurally linked instances of imitatio

19

20

Quotations of the Rose from Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols, Classiques français du Moyen Âge 92, 95, 98 (Paris, 1965–75). See William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto, 1994), p. 218. Cf. Kevin Brownlee’s assertion that the Fountain is ‘a purely literary entity created out of (by means of references to) what amounts to an almost omnipresent subtext, the Roman de la Rose’, in Poetic Identity, p. 194. Copeland, Rhetoric, p. 25.



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seems to promise that close replication will yield the benefits of effective patronage that will be authorized by earlier practices of imitatio. This ideal, however, requires that all distinguishing relationships be collapsed for the salutary verbatim imitatio to work to its fullest potential. Thus, the divine Morpheus stands in for the mortal, and dead, Ceyx; Machaut does not particularly differentiate between using Ovid and the Ovide; classical and French subjects jostle for space on the fountain; and the narrator and the nobleman ultimately emerge as joint authors of that complainte because their minds are united to the point of sharing dreams. In the Fonteinne such unity, present on multiple levels, is celebrated as the text’s desired outcome since the patronage relationship produces a new kind of collaborative authorial relationship. Thus, the verbatim imitatio goes beyond the ‘mere’ replication decried within traditional rhetoric. In this way, Machaut offers a challenge to the older models of imitatio from classical and late antique rhetoric that call for filial, rather than exact, resemblances to their sources by insisting that perfect copies can, within the sociocultural structures of patronage, in fact, produce something new. Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, however, consciously repudiates the Fonteinne’s emphasis on verbatim imitatio, and, with it, the central importance of the beneficial poet–patron relationship to a poet’s literary formation. Chaucer demonstrates instead, I argue, that imitatio works best when it is self-consciously messy: that is, when it draws attention to its transmutation of sources. In so doing, Chaucer’s brand of imitatio emphasizes that the poet is authorized not by his contemporary relationship to his patron but by his historical relationship to his literary predecessors.

Imitatio in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess Belief in the achievability of verbatim imitatio requires belief in language’s inherent capacity to produce unequivocal meaning; it requires faith that nothing will get lost in the process of transmission. It also requires the ability to perform imitatio well. Machaut’s Fonteinne insists on this possibility: the narrator’s transcription of the nobleman’s virtuosic 50-stanza complainte, being in fact a replication, is perfect and error-free. Furthermore, the narrator correctly apprehends the cause of the nobleman’s grief: he transcribes the words, but he also gathers their meaning. Like Machaut, Chaucer also has the Dreamer and the Black Knight meet after the Dreamer overhears the Black Knight’s lament, as he comes upon him in the forest (BD 445–64). We are not told that the Dreamer has transcribed the Knight’s lament, although he apparently is able to relate it: ‘ful wel I kan / Reherse hyt; right thus hyt began …’ (473–4). However, in contradistinction to Machaut, the Dreamer repeats the Knight’s lament without retaining any of its content. The Knight’s first stanza plainly expresses the cause of his suffering:

168  Elizaveta Strakhov I have of sorwe so gret won That joye gete I never non, Now that I see my lady bryght, Which I have loved with al my myght, Is fro me ded and ys agoon.

(475–9, emphases added)

Nevertheless, the Dreamer famously spends the next 830 lines trying to understand the cause of the Knight’s grief, having somehow missed it despite being able to ‘ful wel … reherse’ the Knight’s lament, until the Knight finally explains: ‘She ys ded!’ (1309). Thus, if Machaut’s narrator not only recorded the nobleman’s lament but also correctly understood its content, as evidenced by his immediately producing it in fulfillment of the nobleman’s ‘requeste’ for a poem that would express his grief, Chaucer’s Dreamer overhears and records so mechanically as to neglect content entirely. The Dreamer’s baffling incomprehension of plain spoken speech seems to suggest, contra Machaut, that verbatim imitatio runs the risk of merely parroting the surface, without penetrating more deeply into the sentence. If Machaut’s narrator was clearly capable of efficacious verbatim imitatio, which enshrined his newfound patronage, Chaucer denies to his Dreamer any such possibility. This communicative failure, however, Chaucer goes on to suggest, may lie less with the Dreamer than with the slippery operations of language itself, as other scholars have pointed out.21 Specifically, Chaucer is concerned as to whether language can, in fact, be apprehended aurally. In the Fonteinne language is such a guarantor of meaning that the narrator can overhear a 50-stanza-long poem and copy it down verbatim. Meanwhile, in the Duchess, imitatio’s failure is framed by a hunt for a ‘hert’, a word meaning either heart or hart. The scene involving the Dreamer and Knight begins with the Dreamer’s hearing a hunting horn and men discussing ‘[h]ow they wolde slee the hert with strengthe’ (351) and concludes with ‘al was doon, / For that tyme, the hert-huntyng’ (1312–13). Scholars such as Joseph Grennen and Sandra Pierson Prior have read this ‘hert-huntyng’ as a metaphor for the grieving process.22 However, the hert wordplay also specifically points to the problem of homophony: heart and hart sound exactly alike in Middle English. 21

22

See Ardis Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 33–60, esp. p. 50, for the poem as a commentary on the failure of lyric language, in its conventionality, to properly express the truth and cause of human emotion. For Robert Sturges, linguistic meaning can only be attained through dialogue, hence the Dreamer’s barrage of questions is the only means of yielding full interpretation: Medieval Interpretation: Modes of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 (Carbondale, IL, 1991), pp. 130–8. Cf. Diane M. Ross, ‘The Play of Genres in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 19/1 (1984), 1–13 (at p. 2). See also Peter Travis, who reads the poem in the context of nominalism debates to suggest that the Duchess focuses on the essential inability of language to achieve much beyond a series of failed and failing signifiers: ‘White’, SAC 22 (2000), 1–66. Joseph E. Grennen, ‘Hert-Huntyng in The Book of the Duchess’, MLQ 25/2 (1964), 131–9 and Sandra Pierson Prior, ‘Routhe and Hert-Huntyng in the Book of the Duchess’, JEGP 85/1 (1986), 3–19.



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By framing the ineffectual conversation concerning meaning between the Dreamer and the Knight with this hert wordplay, Chaucer emphasizes the challenge of hearing discourse properly. By underscoring the homophonic complexity of language in this way, Chaucer suggests that verbatim imitatio always has the potential to fail, thus further exploding Machaut’s fantasy of imitatio guaranteeing successful patronage. In the same way that Machaut’s claims for imitatio’s uses were prefigured earlier in his work by the figure of Morpheus, and reified on the metapoetic level by Machaut’s use of sources for the Ceyx and Alcyone episode, similar operations with Morpheus, and the Ceyx and Alcyone episode more generally, take place in Chaucer’s Duchess. Significantly, Chaucer explicitly gestures to his knowledge of Machaut’s Ceyx and Alcyone episode in his own. The Fonteinne’s nobleman prays that Morpheus might assume the prince’s own shape and come to his beloved in a dream, for which he will offer Morpheus a night-cap and a feather-bed (FA 807–10). In a comic deflation, Chaucer’s Dreamer promises Morpheus a feather-bed in exchange for sleep (BD 240–55). The detail of the feather-bed is only present in Machaut’s version, rendering it clear that Chaucer is alluding to Machaut’s use of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode within his own. Just as the Knight’s transmission of meaning to the Dreamer is plagued by incomprehension, so too is Morpheus’ transmission of Ceyx’s message marked with considerably less success. Whereas Machaut notes that Alcyone sees her husband ‘clerement’ [clearly] (FA 683) and ‘sot certeinnement’ [knew for certain] (684) that he is dead, Chaucer’s Alcyone ‘saw nought’ (BD 213), even though her husband’s body, as animated by Morpheus, ‘stood ryght at hyr beddes fet’ (199). Chaucer further emphasizes the ambiguity of this scene in his representation of Alcyone’s response: ‘Allas!’ quod she for sorwe, And deyede within the thridde morwe. But what she sayede more in that swow I may not telle yow as now; Hyt were to longe for to dwelle.

(213–17)

In one of his characteristic moments of occupatio, Chaucer conveniently passes over whether his Alcyone ‘sot certeinnement’ that her husband is dead; it is implied but not explicitly stated. Furthermore, plain speech again poses a problem in the scene. As Judith Ferster points out, Morpheus-asCeyx gives Alcyone two pieces of instruction: first, he says, ‘Let be your sorwful lyf’ (202), then he instructs her to go to the seashore, locate and bury his body (206–8). But Alcyone carries out only the first half of the instruction; literally obeying, she lets go of her life by quickly dying.23 In this way, 23

Judith Ferster, ‘Intention and Interpretation in the Book of the Duchess’, Criticism 22/1 (1980), 1–24 (at pp. 5–6). On the Duchess as investigating the properties of literal versus

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Alcyone’s failed understanding of Ceyx’s message prefigures the Dreamer’s failure properly to interpret the plain speech of the Knight’s lament, just as in Machaut’s Fonteinne Alcyone’s successful apprehension of Ceyx’s death prefigured the success of the narrator’s and nobleman’s interactions. Furthermore, unlike the Morpheus of Machaut (and Ovid and the Ovide), Chaucer’s Morpheus is a deeply uncanny figure. Chaucer’s Morpheus does not reproduce Ceyx’s likeness: he dredges Ceyx’s corpse from the bottom of the sea and crawls inside it, turning it into a somnambulistic marionette. If Machaut’s Morpheus is intended to figure Machaut’s faith in the efficacy of verbatim imitatio, then Chaucer’s seems instead to suggest that imitatio is much more complicated than mere replication. By having Morpheus ‘crepe’ inside Ceyx, rather than simply replicate his external appearance, Chaucer suggests that imitatio is the process of inhabiting someone or something from the inside, rather than merely reproducing external appearances. In so doing, Chaucer exposes the poverty of his Dreamer’s imitatio that mechanically reproduces the words of the Knight’s lament without apprehending their inner meaning. However, he also seems to insist that this kind of inhabiting, as opposed to replicating, can – and perhaps should – be awkward and difficult. Chaucer’s uncomfortably imitative Morpheus maps onto Chaucer’s less tidy rewriting of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode, which is much more intertextual than Machaut’s. Where Machaut mainly uses Ovid and the Ovide moralisé, focusing on main plot points of the story in an exemplification of his own uses of imitatio in the Fonteinne, Chaucer’s Ceyx and Alcyone section relies on several other sources besides, taken from very different texts. While the majority of the episode adapts moments either from Ovid or the Ovide (being moments common to both versions), for details of Morpheus’ Cave of Sleep Chaucer also appropriates an episode in Statius’ Thebaid that itself alludes to Ovid’s Ceyx and Alcyone tale.24 The topographical features outside the cave, the diversity of somnolent dream figures, the inability to wake Morpheus, and the god’s immediate fulfillment of the request further constitute parallels not with Ovid or the Ovide, but rather with the Thebaid.25 Meanwhile, when Morpheus-as-Ceyx finally appears to Alcyone, his address to her recalls

24

25

figurative language, see further Arthur W. Bahr, ‘The Rhetorical Construction of Narrator and Narrative in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess’, ChR 35/1 (2000), 43–59 (esp. pp. 50–3), and A. C. Spearing, ‘Literal and Figurative in The Book of the Duchess’, in SAC, Proceedings No. 1, 1984, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, TN, 1984), 165–71. It should be noted, however, that Machaut also briefly alludes to Statius’ rendition of the Cave of Sleep in lines 590–92, but his Statian debt seems restricted to just these lines: James Wimsatt, ‘The Sources of Chaucer’s “Seys and Alcyone”’, Medium Ævum 36/3 (1967), 231–41 (at p. 233). Ibid., pp. 232–6.



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Creusa’s ghost’s address to Aeneas in Book II of the Aeneid.26 Thus, Chaucer’s version seems to rely on several additional classical sources.27 Chaucer’s treatment of the Ceyx and Alcyone story also features more authorial invention in comparison to Machaut’s, and this invention points to still more complicated uses of additional literary sources. In addition to rewriting entirely the manner of Morpheus’ assumption of Ceyx’s likeness, Chaucer also significantly omits the kingfisher metamorphosis. By thus removing the originary narrative for which Ovid’s version of the tale was created, Chaucer demonstrates that he has appropriated the tale for thoroughly different purposes; far from replicating it, he transforms it entirely. Furthermore, he renders Morpheus as the God of Sleep himself, rather than a son, and this Morpheus in turn has an heir named Eclympasteyr (BD 167–8). This is a new character lifted from Jean Froissart’s Paradys d’amour, in which Froissart’s insomniac narrator begs Juno for sleep, prompting the goddess to send Iris to the God of Sleep, who then sends his son, Enclinpostair, to calm the narrator. Thus, Froissart’s allusion to the Ceyx and Alcyone tale with his narrator as stand-in for Alcyone is also brought to bear on Chaucer’s Ceyx and Alcyone episode. That this move is intentional is revealed by the Duchess’ near-verbatim reproduction in its opening lines of Froissart’s opening lines, concerning his narrator’s insomnia just before he assumes Alcyone’s role.28 Chaucer’s version of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode emerges as a sort of homage to a range of influences, from classical sources like the Metamorphoses and the Thebaid to their later medieval adaptations by French authors such as that of the Ovide, as well as Froissart. As his use of Froissart demonstrates especially provocatively, verbatim imitatio is something Chaucer flirts with, but as a supplement to more complex forms of imitatio. By citing a wider range of sources running from classical antiquity all the way through Froissart, Chaucer brings a deeper and more variegated literary genealogy to bear on his rendition of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode than does Machaut, who draws only on Ovid and the Ovide. In so doing, Chaucer seems to emphasize, more than Machaut had, the multiple levels and chronological breadth of the literary transmission standing between him and Ovid’s original. Even the Dreamer’s intradiegetic experience of reading the Ceyx and Alcyone story underscores the notion of transmission as an unnamed figure in his bedchamber procures him the book: ‘Upon my bed I sat upright / And bad oon reche me a book, / A romaunce, and he it me tok / To rede and drive the night away’ (BD 46–9). The mysterious figure who hands Chaucer the book is never seen again, suggesting that its function is purely to literalize the idea of literary transmission. Machaut’s commitment to verbatim imitatio, mirrored in the Fonteinne’s 26 27 28

Ibid., pp. 237–8. Ibid., p. 239. On this, see Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, pp. 124–35.

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own replicative use of its literary sources, is visually represented, we may recall, by the Fountain of Love itself, with its amalgamation of Trojan and Ovidian Rose motifs on a single surface. In the Duchess, by contrast, the physical separation of these same motifs is emphatically stressed. After falling asleep over the Ceyx and Alcyone tale, the Dreamer wakes up to find his bedchamber transformed with stained glass and wall paintings. Images of the fall of Troy are ‘in the glasynge ywroght’ (327), and the sun shining through the windows deposits beams of light onto the Dreamer’s bed (336–8).29 Surrounding the stained glass are wall paintings of ‘bothe text and glose, / Of al the Romaunce of the Rose’ (333–4). The detail of the Rose’s ‘glose’ brings in that sense of a lengthier and more complex literary genealogy, already signaled in Chaucer’s Ceyx and Alcyone episode by his use of multiple classical sources along with Froissart’s Enclinpostair. Furthermore, Chaucer highlights the generic differences between the Matter of Troy and the Rose by emphasizing their disparate media, whereby the Rose, as muted wall painting, is visually subordinate to the shining Trojan stained glass windows.30 In Machaut’s Fonteinne, the Fountain of Love is all wrought of the same material, enameled ivory, evoking Machaut’s central conceit concerning imitatio, namely that the exact replication of the original, which entails the omission of any distinction between imitated and imitating, is desirable and beneficial to the young poet seeking patronage. Chaucer, we have seen, resists this idea, so it follows that he takes the same motifs – Troy and Rose – and visually underscores in the scene of the painted bedchamber, contra Machaut, their crucial distinctions.31 By stressing the vital differences between the Matter of Troy and the Rose, Chaucer promulgates his own very different conception of imitatio. Chaucer separates Troy from Rose on the walls of the bedchamber by means of both spatial arrangement and media, thus emphasizing an author’s collection, organization, and taxonomization of his literary sources to transform them into new material. His insistence on the visual separation of Trojan and Rose matters in the bedchamber, the 29

30

31

See Mary Carruthers on how the bedchamber functions as a memory palace: ‘“The Mystery of the Bed Chamber:” Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, in The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages, Reconstructive Polyphony: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (Madison, WI, 2000), pp. 67–87. Michael Norman Salda argues that the bedchamber simultaneously evokes a manuscript page as well as an actual room at Westminster painted with text and image: ‘Pages from History: The Medieval Palace of Westminster as a Source for the Dreamer’s Chamber in the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 27/2 (1992), 111–25. See Lisa Kiser’s intriguing assertion that ‘[w]ith this detail Chaucer comments on his own poetic debts, though far from rejecting the French courtly traditions that the Black Knight has tried so hard to master, Chaucer seems to be saying that classical poetry, through whose windows one sees the world and the heavenly light at once, has much more to offer a young poet in search of a voice’: ‘Sleep, Dreams, and Poetry in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Papers on Language and Literature 19/1 (1983), 3–12 (at p. 12). Cf. Calin, French Tradition, p. 287.



The Poet-Patron Relationship in Chaucer and Machaut  173

very same subjects that Machaut placed together onto a single object, exemplifies this investment. In such a way, unlike Machaut, Chaucer distinguishes between and hierarchically arranges his literary sources by type (classical versus medieval French, main text versus commentary), emphasizing the vast literary landscape informing his work.32 Machaut places the accent on the text that one has produced, especially with respect to its recipient and the immediate circumstances of its production. In a patronage-focused project, imitatio is conceptualized in terms of the contemporary transmission of contemporary texts, since the goal ensuring poetic success is to forge socioeconomic bonds with one’s contemporary readers. From this perspective, placing one’s texts within a diachronic model of literary succession becomes subordinate to the goal of synchronic transmission; therefore, Machaut is not invested in offering his text a deep sense of literary history and privileges replicating literary texts over inhabiting and transforming them. By contrast, Chaucer, who subverts the patronage model in the Duchess, seems to view poetic achievement as predicated on genealogical literary succession, in which one’s literary influences must be charted and organized to allow one to present oneself at the end of a long lineage, in line with the uses of imitatio advocated by Horace, Quintilian, Seneca, and John of Salisbury. Chaucer’s Duchess is thus a systematic response to Machaut’s understanding of imitatio’s relationship to poetic formation, whereby Chaucer advances imitatio as a tool for conceptualizing one’s place in literary history against Machaut’s model of conceptualizing one’s place in the literary present.

Conclusion: Resisting the Counterfeit It is notable, in this regard, to consider, by way of conclusion, that Chaucer’s own text famously is not explicitly occasional, although it is clear that the Black Knight who rides to a ‘long castel … on a ryche hil’ (1318–19) is John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster and earl of Richmond (until 1372), grieving for ‘White’, i.e., Blanche of Lancaster. Chaucer even refers to the poem as ‘the Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse’ (F 418; G 406) in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, but its meandering structure and bizarre characterization of both Black Knight and Dreamer, whose conversation culminates

32

Cf. Deborah Horowitz, who sees the dream-vision’s and its frame’s telescopic quality – which she terms a ‘transcape’ – as visually expressing the way its textual allusions usher in a vast literary past, stretching from antiquity through Chaucer’s French contemporaries: Deborah Horowitz, ‘An Aesthetic of Permeability: Three Transcapes of the Book of the Duchess’, ChR 39/3 (2005), 259–79 (at pp. 269–70).

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in comic exasperation only to end abruptly, precludes viewing it as a typical elegy.33 As Jamie Fumo concludes, [e]ven if we suppose [the Duchess’s defiance of elegiac norms] to be a strategy of self-insulation, by which Chaucer negotiates his delicate social position vis-à-vis Gaunt through a creative elaboration of the humility topos, the poem seems too diffuse to function chiefly as a public tribute, too idiosyncratic to be explicable entirely in terms of a historical … audience.34

To my mind, Chaucer’s resistance to Machaut’s focus on the poet–patron relationship neatly explicates the Duchess’ ambiguous relationship to its own occasional status. If we understand Chaucer as repeatedly querying Machaut’s investment in patronage as prerequisite for literary success, then it makes sense for his poem to balk at openly embracing its occasionality. Chaucer’s Duchess sends up the idea of verbatim imitatio, and its role in establishing effective patronage, by transforming Machaut’s vision of the perfect meeting of minds between poet and patron into the comic series of miscommunications between Dreamer and Black Knight. Chaucer further dismisses Machaut’s vision of imitatio by asserting that spoken language is too fundamentally unstable to establish the kind of relationship promised in Machaut’s Fonteinne. He also, importantly, has his protagonists reiterate dread before the notion of the ‘counterfeit’, a dread of which his Morpheus, who does not counterfeit but reanimates, becomes the fitting apogee. Chaucer, I suspect, implicitly characterizes Machaut’s vision of verbatim imitatio as ‘counterfeit’ because Chaucer’s own notion of historicizing imitatio emerges not just as a guarantor of literary success but also a guarantor of ‘truth’. If spoken language cannot be relied upon as a fixture of ‘truth’ owing to its inherent slipperiness, then the ‘truth’ of one’s poetic endeavor must be guaranteed and authorized in some other way. That other way, Chaucer seems to suggest, is literary history, which supplies a stability that the contemporary literary present, filled with shifting relationships of patronage predicated on the mutability of language, cannot offer. That being said, this ‘truth’ of literary history – if we take Morpheus as the figure for Chaucer’s understanding of imitatio – is often uncanny and, like Ceyx’s body, difficult to manipulate, but it is, in all its awkwardness, superior to the ‘counterfeit’ dehistoricizing option that Chaucer imputes to Machaut. Thus, the fullness of Chaucer’s critique of Machaut lies in this: Machaut, as his own use of literary sources illustrates, subordinates concerns surrounding historicizing imitatio and literary history to concerns surrounding verbatim imitatio and the literary present. Literary history, collapsed together on the 33

34

See Jamie C. Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (Cardiff, 2015), pp. 18–27 and associated bibliography for a concise overview of the issues surrounding viewing the Duchess as an occasional poem. Ibid., p. 22.



The Poet-Patron Relationship in Chaucer and Machaut  175

Fountain of Love, is placed into the service of supporting the newfound poet–patron relationship. Chaucer reverses this dynamic, situating literary history – carefully and spatially taxonomized – as the transformed residence of the Dreamer, into which he awakens within his dream, and through which he must pass to encounter his potential patron. Without that arrangement, where literary history opens the pathway that leads to networks of patronage, literary history becomes, for Chaucer, reduced to mere ornament, evacuated of its ‘truth’ and leaving everything else ‘counterfeit’.

9 The Shock of the Old? The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations HELEN PHILLIPS

Describing the temple of Venus in the Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer lists devotees of the goddess: Semyramis, Candace, and Hercules, Biblis, Dido, Thisbe, and Piramus, Tristram, Isaude, Paris, and Achilles, Eleyne, Cleopatre, and Troylus, Silla, and ek the moder of Romulus[.]

(288–92)

The opposite wall shows erstwhile followers of Diana: Callisto, Atalanta and others. Although the names on these walls issue from precedents in Dante and Boccaccio, the signification Chaucer gives his list(s) differs from meanings either poet associated with theirs.1 His summary, ‘al here love, and in what plyt they dyde’ (294) – a signification linking love to pain and death – is provocative (positive or negative? admonitory or admiring?), especially in the structural context: what is it saying about Venus? This passage from the Parliament well illustrates many characteristics of Chaucer’s antique citations. These include unanswered questions, incongruities, surprises, and parallels in micro between contents of name lists and larger themes and structures in a text. In the case of the Parliament passage, the issues raised include: One list or two? How do Diana’s former followers on the temple’s opposite wall fit in? Why, with a surprisingly flippant switch of register, are those said to ‘waste’ their time serving the goddess (283)? Which goddess?2 Does an imperative to abandon chastity and mate emerge here, rendering Chaucer’s Venus an ally of 1

2

Dante Alighieri, Inferno 5, lines 58–69 (in The Divine Comedy, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols [Princeton, NJ, 1973]); Boccaccio, The Book of Theseus / Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, trans. Bernadette Marie McCoy (New York, 1974), book 7, stanzas 61–2. Dante’s names represent the sin of lust, damned in Hell; Boccaccio’s text is noncommittal, though his gloss distinguishes the two Venuses. Critics differ: e.g. J. A. W. Bennett, The Parlement of Fowls, An Interpretation (Oxford,

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Chaucer’s Nature? Does this prefigure the formel’s reluctance to mate? What do the lists say about Venus? About two Venuses?3 Nature? Diana? Why is raped Vestal Rhea Silvia named (dynastically?) as ‘moder of Romulus’, and among lovers? Placed at a crucial juncture, the name lists, a rhetorical device easily considered mere ornament, add dialectically and dramatically to the poem’s mental and ethical conundrums. The Book of the Duchess’s name lists prove equally intriguing, with (as shown below) some additional features peculiar to that text. One need only recall Dorigen’s list of women and the Legend of Good Women’s ‘Hyd Absolon’ to see how dramatic in context and challenging in content Chaucer’s deployment of ancient names can be throughout his literary career. Though easy to label at first sight as instances of the common medieval tactic of argument and amplification by exempla, ‘exemplarity’ often seems no longer the right term, and a readily discernible or unified message may not appear. Sometimes in the Book of the Duchess the very function of names as exemplary is rejected. Name lists with many purposes appeared in classical literature. They were common in medieval writings, learned and devout, and, with particular relevance for Chaucer’s dream poetry, in his French contemporaries’ dits and lyrics, frequently composed for princely patrons. Exemplary catalogues also abound in misogynist and gender-debate writings. It is not only their frequency in courtly and misogynist texts that call for the critic’s attention but the ideological ends they serve. These include implicit claims for continuity between contemporary aristocracy and the chivalry of antiquity, the misogynistic imputation that the generality of women has always been bad, and patriarchal slants on what constitutes female virtue. Chaucer’s ancient name lists produce more complex, disconcerting effects than his other rhetorical lists, like the Parliament’s list of trees, in which diversity smoothly becomes harmony, or the elegant list of tragic love paradoxes spoken by the Black Knight (BD 603–17). The subtle artistry of Chaucer’s lists of antique names, which includes a capacity to disturb and surprise, has been insufficiently recognised. Even seemingly odd or clumsy moments in these lists can be revealed as sophisticated manipulation of themes, registers, or structures. The care that Chaucer expends over such lists’ three main components – the selection of names, any details added to particular names, the overall signification framing a list – is this paper’s main subject. His management of lists contributes to important narrative patterns and often marks significant junctures. Unlike certain of his contemporaries, whose antique name lists can seem comparatively routine,

3

1957), pp. 98–105 (Diana); Deanne Williams, ‘The Dream Visions’, in Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, CT, 2006), pp. 147–78 (at p. 169) (Venus). Explored by Bennett, The Parlement of Fowls, pp. 94–100; P. M. Kean, Love Vision and Debate, Vol. 1 of Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry (London, 1972), p. 80.



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  179

even casual (Charles d’Orléans provides some obvious examples), 4 Chaucer shows a control, creativity, and readiness to surprise which are quite distinctive, and exceeds any contemporary, perhaps even including Guillaume de Machaut, at least in this specific matter of citing antique name lists, though in some wider senses, citation, including self-citation and narrative exempla, yields some of the most powerful and individual structures of Machaut’s music and poetry. The Book of the Duchess contains no didactic inset narrative exempla of the sort familiar particularly from medieval preaching and elsewhere in Chaucer’s oeuvre. Recent Chaucer criticism has recognised profound intricacies and challenges in narrative exemplarity.5 Inset short exemplum tales, the Legend’s legends, and Chaucer’s identifications of whole Canterbury tales as exempla (most obviously the Pardoner’s and, post-tale, the Clerk’s), all engender controversial designs. Such exemplarity adds a perspective on Chaucer’s narratives which yields more complex structures and textualities, intensifying questions of aesthetics, hermeneutics, and epistemology, and frequently also of ethical positioning. In contrast, his name lists have received minor or dismissive attention, exacerbated for the Book of the Duchess by often negative views of its rhetoric in general. What attention these have received has usually been within speculation about indebtedness to sources, particularly didactic ones. This paper argues that Chaucer uses such lists with unusual circumspection and far-reaching consequences. Even when indebted to sources, the lists’ overall significations are his own: messages attached to names by earlier poets cannot simply be transferred onto Chaucer’s names. Moreover, many names during centuries of use in writings of different types acquired unstable, varied, even contradictory reputations. Aeneas and Alexander, for example, were presented as both good and bad. The most seriously unstable reputations befell classical female lovers, most obviously Dido and Medea.6 Theresa Tinkle has shown the fallacy of modern hopes for finding straightforward, invariable, unambiguous authority underlying medieval presentations of many mythological figures, including Venus, Cupid, and Nature. Textual variation and ‘highly selective appropriation’ of messages by authors, adaptors, and copyists ensured over time ‘the richly variant, erratic, and discontinuous life’ of

4

5

6

E.g. Charles’ Ballade 64, in Fortune’s Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Books of Love, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Binghamton, NY, 1994), p. 215, line 2207 (the French equivalent readily varies the cited names). E.g. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, 1994); J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge, 2004). See Helen Phillips, ‘Chaucer and Jean Le Fèvre’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprache und Literaturen 232 (1995), 23–36.

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sources, especially concerning sexuality.7 The afterlives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Mathéolus’ Lamentations, and the Roman de la Rose show medieval readers’ familiarity with approaches to pagan antiquity and its famous lovers that presented them diversely, through idiosyncratic and context-dependent interpretations or through prisms of contemporary practices of debate and palinode. When we add to these caveats the equivocations about meaning and ethical standpoint, and the witty dialectic, frequent in Chaucer’s writing and in that of his most influential and seemingly congenial vernacular inspirations, especially Jean de Meun and Machaut but also Boccaccio and Benoît de SainteMaure, particularly through diverse voices, and especially in the handling of sexual desire, the argument becomes even stronger for giving primary attention to how Chaucer actually manages his name lists. Presentation of classical figures was multifaceted, as well as potentially contentious, in the (relatively) secular genres of romance and chronicle when treating medieval writers’ most powerful secular historical subjects: mighty warriors, rulers and conquerors, their passions and tragedies. Relationships between Chaucer and his medieval and classical backgrounds, when he delves back into the past for materials, are multifaceted, sophisticated, and independent, even when he appears deferential and imitative. We can consequently never assume that hinterland texts will furnish a fast-track to single, simple, or straightforward messages.

Some Critical Approaches and Debates The viewpoint expressed in the last two paragraphs locate the present study within longstanding critical controversies about Chaucer’s handling of inherited, especially pagan, antique traditions. Some critics, especially but not exclusively within the American patristic tradition of the twentieth century’s second half, argued for stable didacticism behind classical allusions. Jane Chance, for example, interpreted the sunlight streaming through Trojan figures in the Dreamer’s window in the Book of the Duchess as a symbolic directive to readers to take doctrines from mythographic commentary and Ovidian moralizations as the correct guide to interpreting these names, Alcyone’s tragedy, and the message a mourner should learn from them. According to Chance,

7

Theresa Tinkle, ‘The Case of the Variable Source: Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae, Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, and Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules’, SAC 22 (2000), 341–77; Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Literature (Stanford, CA, 1996).



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  181 Chaucer’s artistry consists in showing the resolution of the Black Knight’s grief through his coming to understand by means of therapeutic dialogue the meaning of the story of Alcione as mediated by the commentary tradition.8

Sunbeams mediating analogously through the window’s figures instruct ‘the narrator – Chaucer the poet’ in ‘how to use classical fable’. Accordingly, Chance derives from clerkly traditions significations for names in the poem: ‘Ticius … signifies lust; Tantalus pride’, and so on.9 Critical attitudes to name lists, including dismissive ones, have always reflected larger currents in Chaucer criticism. Full discussion exceeds this essay’s limits but several critical approaches, besides the patristic, have particular bearing on the poem’s antique names. Pre-1960s literary attitudes, prizing human verisimilitude, found the Book of the Duchess redundantly rhetorical, stiff or disjointed, over-dependent on the perceived artificiality of French models. When in 1952 Bertrand H. Bronson mounted a defence of the Duchess’s rhetoric, this included exempla lists. He argued, acceding to prevailing criticism’s criteria, that touches of ‘verisimilitude’ could indeed be found in the Knight’s rhetorical extravaganzas, his ‘impulsive little bursts of ecstasy over one aspect and then another of his lady’s merits’, but also insisted that modern readers needed to embrace a contemporary aesthetic of ornamentation: ‘the crowded abundance of detail – and sometimes the irrelevance – that strikes us often in medieval textiles’. In illustration Bronson cited two of the poem’s exemplary name lists. Bronson was content to see such writing as decoration, an embellishing craftsmanship: ‘the forms … “of hammered gold and gold enamelling”’. This, for Bronson, was a collage-like technique and artistic principle: Chaucer’s contemporaries would have judged his work by the delicacy with which he ‘composed his appliqué into a fresh design’. This would not necessarily involve careful selection, control, or unity: Chaucer was happy with a scattergun, random effect – with ‘irrelevance’.10 Mid-twentieth-century suspicion of overt rhetoric often combined with the critical hypothesis of Chaucer’s foolish speakers, derived from George L. Kittredge’s construct of a naïve bookish narrator persona.11 John P. McCall, in a study unusually attentive to name lists, argued for their frequently comic use in the House of Fame, Franklin’s Tale, Wife of Bath’s Tale and elsewhere. In the Book of the Duchess McCall reads the Dreamer’s and Knight’s classical allusions as both failing to command respect. The Dreamer’s flippant 8 9 10 11

Jane Chance, The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics (Minneapolis, MN, 1995), 25–31 (esp. p. 25). Ibid., p. 28. Bronson, ‘The Book of the Duchess Re-Opened’, PMLA 67/5 (1952), 863–81 (esp. pp. 867–8). George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1915), esp. p. 50.

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references to Juno and Morpheus (‘their meaning is not nearly as significant as their tone’) establishes the comic tone; thereafter the Knight’s extravagant ‘mythic name-dropping’ shows he has lost his mind and veers unstably towards ‘infernal, tragic and suicidal forces … a self-indulgence that is quite unnatural’.12 That darker turn in reading the Knight’s rhetoric locates McCall among critics who found in the poem’s style a warning against over-literary constructions of love and death. Robert M. Jordan acknowledged many critics’ perceptions of an uneven mingling of comic and serious in the Book of the Duchess, and saw a disunified assemblage of rhetorical passages, but opposed the Robertsonian preoccupation with ‘Christian interpretation of content’ over ‘aesthetic analysis of forms’ and defended the poem’s aesthetic qualities. Conceding that Chaucer adds stand-alone rhetorical ornaments (‘Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s jewellery box’), he calls the Knight’s antique names in lines 1054–74 ‘gratuitous half-comic digression’ and the Dreamer’s list (lines 726–36) a ‘similarly ill-­ applied catalogue of erudition’, exposing his ‘dubious taste and refinement’. Yet Jordan argues that the poem’s penchant for rhetorical ‘enumeration’, and alleged disruptions and inconsistencies, while disqualifying it from modern criteria for organic unity, are typical of the ‘aggregative brilliance’ of Gothic aesthetics.13 Employing patristic methodology and the naïve Chaucerian narrator hypothesis, Katherine Heinrichs extends a ‘foolish lover’ label to both of the Book of the Duchess’s speakers. She argues for singleness of message throughout the composition and its possible contexts, including clerkly and literary predecessors, and extends this to Chaucer’s alleged aim for the work’s reception: the affirmation of a philosophy already shared by him and his audience. The classical name lists, according to such a reading, teach a single lesson – the dangers of passion – while employing a double stratagem: the speakers’ rhetorical excesses reveal culpable folly, Heinrichs claims, yet the contents of their name lists (if traced back to what are considered the correct sources) contain potentially valuable nuggets of admonition.14 Barbara Nolan’s study of the romans antiques, major influences on later vernacular handling of classical lovers, including Chaucer’s, similarly argues for a ‘fole amour’ message and the importance of the commentary tradition. Nolan also, however, points to the romans’ own multiple perspectives on classical stories, especially in Benoît’s Roman de Troie, which it is argued arise from a diversity of viewpoint caused by reading Ovid’s poetry alongside commentaries 12 13 14

McCall, Chaucer among the Gods: The Poetics of Classical Myth (University Park, PA, 1979), pp. 21, 23, 49, 123–51. Robert M. Jordan, Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader (Berkeley, CA, 1987), pp. 100, 111, 113, 114. Katherine Heinrichs, Myths of Love: Classical Lovers in Medieval Literature (University Park, PA, 1990), esp. pp. 221, 231.



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  183

and glosses, as well as contemporary scholastic practices of quaestio and debate.15 Romans antiques, whose characters’ speeches articulate dialectical approaches to desire and its woes, presented high-born secular audiences with intriguing questions, and the ambiguity surrounding several figures in antique name lists in Chaucer’s dream poetry reflects a long history of divergent presentations of passion and love-tragedies in major sources for his period’s reception of heroic figures. It also belongs to his own career-long (arguably changing and developing) preoccupation with questions about relation­ships between female virtue and passion, love’s affinity with suffering, masculine chivalry and desire (leading to the Legend’s outing of some of antiquity’s key role-models for knightly masculine identity as no gentil men in their treatment of women). Benjamin S. Harrison’s careful 1934 study of the Duchess’s rhetoric saw ‘youthful unrestraint’ and mere decoration in its antique name lists, and ‘wild and rampant’ comparisons.16 Studies of rhetoric continued with growing respect, quickened by a post-structuralist climate’s appreciation for the profundities (rather than shallowness) of textuality, and for rhetoric as, in Rita Copeland’s words, ‘a fundamental way of thinking and constructing thought’.17 Critical focus on textuality, especially on the relationship of text to extra-textual experience, produces in Kiser’s 1991 Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry a respect for the Dreamer’s and Knight’s rhetoricality, positioning both as poets, alter-egos of the author. Kiser insists that Chaucerian narrative ‘exposes the limitations of human knowledge and calls into question the accessibility of truth’.18 Kiser’s question, of how ‘olde bokes’ and ‘auctoritee’ relate to ‘experience’, especially female experience and reputations, which Chaucer will explore in the Wife of Bath’s and Legend’s prologues, also appears briefly but intriguingly in the Book of the Duchess’ name lists, as will be discussed below. Reputation, fama, is an ever-present concern in Machaut’s and Chaucer’s dits, encompassing the assessment of ancient men and (often more contentiously) women, the renown and honour of contemporary patrons, and the poet’s own concern with fame.

15 16

17 18

Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge, 1992), esp. pp. 77–8. Harrison, ‘Medieval Rhetoric in the Book of the Duchesse’, PMLA 49/2 (1934), 428–42 (at pp. 433, 435). See also William J. Farrell, ‘Chaucer’s Use of the Catalogue’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5/1 (1963), 64–78; James J. Murphy, ‘A New Look at Chaucer and the Rhetoricians’, RES NS 15 (1964), 1–20; Stephen A. Barney, ‘Chaucer’s Lists’, in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry A. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Cambridge, MA, 1982), pp. 189–223. Rita Copeland, ‘Chaucer and Rhetoric’, in Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, CT, 2006), pp. 120–43 (at p. 121). Lisa J. Kiser, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry (Hanover, NH, 1991), pp. 1, 16.

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A Contemporary Princely World of Ancient Avatars Famed antique names in the Book of the Duchess reflect a centuries-long tradition whereby European rulers confirmed chivalric and regal identity by claiming inheritance – a cultural as well as a political translatio – from mighty predecessors in antiquity.19 This inheritance buttressed pre-eminent secular values: ‘knighthood’, upper-class honour, and gentil identity derived from it. Chaucer’s ancient names belong to a language of fashionable princepleasing art, not just homage to a distant past. Indeed, classical figures and their names – Apollo, Paris, Orpheus, and others – are often deployed in music and poetry by Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, and other fourteenth-century courtly writers, with an air (amid all the elegance) of easy familiarity: a very current literary language for composition. The Book of the Duchess uses classical figures as a lexicon of political constructions of both class and gender. Several feminist and psychoanalytical studies read White’s presentation as tending towards erasure and textual death of the female, associated with the image of the blank, the tabula rasa.20 A concomitant of that erasure – its masculine beneficiary – is textual promotion of masculine chivalric identity. To that the poem’s classical names make a crucial contribution. Indeed, its Man in Black, that unnamed, modestly spoken, mere ‘Knight’ in black – a blankness of his own (albeit temporary) – first seen alone in a wood, separate from any social context or identity, will only be named, cryptically, at the end. Yet he has much of the status and grandeur of a great European prince put back into the poetry surrounding him earlier, by names from antique knighthood and ancient kingdoms – Hector, Priam, Achilles, Paris, Helen, Alexander, Lavinia, Aeneas, Jason, Octavian, Orpheus, Alcibiades, Hercules, Rome, Carthage, Troy, Babylon, Macedonia, Alexandria, and others – a texture of tribute to him. The power and magnificence of circles for whom Chaucer (like Machaut) composed dits are brought into this text by names of several kinds, including geographical names. Bedding from ‘Outremere’ and ‘Renyes’ (lines 253, 255) correlates to documented furnishings of English royal households; Walakye, Pruyse, Tartarye, Alisaundre, and Turkeye, listed in lines 1024–29, are no random distant locations but a circle of places marking far-flung extensions of English aristocratic power, commercial interests, and politics.21 Illustration 19

20

21

See Helen Phillips, ‘Medieval Classical Romances: The Perils of Inheritance’, in Christianity and Romance in Medieval England, ed. Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 3–25. E.g. Maud Ellmann, ‘Blanche’, in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn (London, 1984), pp. 99–110; Jane Gilbert, Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 191–214. See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, ed. Helen Phillips (Durham, 1982), pp. 6–7, 148–9 (notes to lines 251–5, 310), pp. 162–3 (notes to lines 1024–6, 1028–9); Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Place of the Bedchamber in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, SAC 37 (2015),



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  185

of how these exotic places came within the imaginary of English royal identity is Edward III’s costume as a Tartar for a masquerade before the famous Cheapside tournament.22 The royalty of Chaucer’s implied audience is incorporated into the verbal texture by repetition of the words king and queen. He introduces the heritage of antique writing behind his own composition as a book produced for, and about, royals. It is not ignorance that transforms the fictional originary ‘booke’, and Chaucer’s actual ur-text Metamorphoses, into a volume about ‘quenes lyves and … kynges’ (lines 47, 58), and ‘kynge’ and ‘quene’ recur in Chaucer’s tale of Alcyone.23 Names listed in lines 280–9 compare the dream he is recounting – this poem – to ancient royal dreams, citing Joseph, Macrobius, and their services to king Pharaoh and king Scipio. Trojan names, in lines 326–31, include king Priamus and king Lamedon. An ‘emperour’ is named at line 368. And that nameless, titleless Knight finally morphs, amid wordplay cryptically naming John, Lancaster, and Richmond, into a ‘kynge’ at line 1314, perhaps referencing Gaunt’s claim to the Castilian throne, before valedictory recall of the book of Alcione and ‘Seys the kynge’ (1327).24 ‘Octavyen’, greeted with deferential enthusiasm, perhaps evoked Edward III; the emperor was certainly a medieval by-word for wealth.25 Perhaps also relevantly, W. Mark Ormrod writes of ‘empire’-like ambitions in Edward’s 1360s dynastic policies to create a Plantagenet hegemony in neighbouring regimes.26 Royal English dynastic identity is suggested by the Trojan allusions in lines 326–31, that parade of heroes and lovers from the Roman de Troie tradition in an ekphrasis of glorious brightness heralding the part of the text which will showcase the Knight and White. If those figures represent Prince John and Blanche of Lancaster, the Trojan celebrities are their predecessors and those of Chaucer’s princely audience, the present-day inheritors in Troynovant of the glory of ancient Troy.27 Some of the poem’s difficult (for moderns) uses of classical allusions reflect the primacy for the princely caste of public historical roles over private emotion. That helps to explain the Knight’s apparently

22

23 24 25 26 27

133–61; Scott D. Westrem, ‘Geography and Travel’, in Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford, 2002), pp. 195–217. Andy King, ‘A Helm with a Crest of Gold: The Order of Chivalry in Thomas Gray’s Scalachronica’, in Fourteenth Century England, I, ed. Nigel Saul (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 21–36 (at p. 26). Citations are based on The Book of the Duchess, ed. Phillips. It is unlikely ‘kynge’ reflects tentative projection in the 1360s of Gaunt as a possible future Scottish king; see W. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven, CT, 2011), p. 39. A. C. Cook, Chaucerian Papers (New Haven, CT, 1919), pp. 31–2; Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, ed. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely (London, 1997), pp. 37–8, 67–8 n. 368. Ormrod, Edward III, pp. 414–45. Caroline Barron, ‘London’, in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 1 600–1540, ed. D. M. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 395–440.

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disproportionate comparison of a setback in his courtship plans with Trojan princess Cassandra’s lamentation over Troy’s fall (lines 1244–8).28 If links between England’s royal dynasties and Troy provide one explanation, another may lie in the weightiness of the Realpolitik, the political magnitude, of what the union between Gaunt and Blanche had meant. Her massive inheritance as co- (later sole) heir to Henry of Lancaster was only part of what was at stake for her fortunate bridegroom: this was a marriage project which Edward III saw could give John a northern power-base at a time when Edward and David of Scotland were interested in doing deals.29 Chaucer’s text-long maintenance, despite the work’s homage to a woman, of the male’s high profile and chivalric identity can be detected even in the list of traitors, lines 1117–25, another apparently clumsily contrived comparison. This list affirms chivalric honour through its antithesis: treason, as the binary opposite to royal lordship and knightly duty – feudal loyalty. Cited here are treasons against royalty: committed by King David’s traitor Achitofel, King Priam’s traitor Antenor, and Charlemagne’s traitor Ganelon. The reference to Priam here reactivates Trojan associations and, as Langland observed, David was considered the originator of medieval knighthood and its ethical and feudal code.30 Like Troy’s fall, those claiming David and Charlemagne are historical disasters on the highest plane. Together they elevate Chaucer’s Knight’s courtship and its vacillating fortunes from the personal sphere to historical and knightly gravitas. And the gravity of feudal treachery implies that the highest kind of honour a knight can know was involved in his devotion to the lady. Treason had become the ultimate crime. Infidelitas, to use the legal term, gained deeper and deeper horror and seriousness alongside policies of centralised monarchical sovereignty attempted by Edward III and later Richard II. Consequently a verbal equivalence – perceptible to contemporary, if not modern, readers – makes feudal infidelitas a natural parallel to the infidelitas of any lessening of the lover’s fixation. It also parallels Chaucer’s linking of female fidelity with the fidelity of historical record, to be considered below (p. 189). This passage transits from talk of amorous forgetting, through ‘repentaunce’ and ‘shryfte’, to themes of masculine military and public duty: chivalric loyalty and treason, the two definitions, positive and negative, of gentil honour. That sequence is aided by Middle English (and Old French and Anglo-Norman) ancillary senses of ‘repente’/‘repentance’, to mean secular, sometimes political, ‘going back’, recidivism, upon a previous decision or

28 29 30

See Benoît de Saint-Maure, Roman de Troie, ed. Léopold Constans, 4 vols, Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1894–98), vol. 4, lines 26113–22. Ormrod, Edward III, p. 391. William Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter, 2008), C, passus 1, lines 101–2.



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agreement.31 Though ‘shryfte’ introduces the religious sense as (naturally) uppermost, creating a rather startling metaphor, those other, secular, senses fit the passage’s transition from abandonment of a romantic devotion to abandonment of feudal fidelity. The segue from private/emotional to public/ feudal infidelitas yet again reinforces the poem’s pervasive attention to public chivalric honour.32 Chaucer’s care to maintain the male aristocratic lover’s elevated status also structures his particular treatment of a series of ‘worthies’ in lines 1055–74, when read against its superficially similar source. Chaucer’s Knight says he would Have loved best   my lady free, Thogh I hadde   al the beaute That ever had   Alcipyades, And al the strengthe   of Ercules …

(1055–8)33

adding the ‘worthynesse’ [prowess] of Alexander; the wealth of Babylon, Carthage, Macedonia, Rome, or Nineveh; the courage of Hector, whom Achilles slew at Troy – Achilles who was slain with Antilochus because of love for Polyxena; and Minerva’s wisdom: I wolde ever,   withoute drede, Have loved hir …

(1073–4)

Chaucer’s man insists in this passage that however impressive his own assets might be, he would still love the woman. In contrast, Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, lines 107–37, uses a similar name list to abase the male lover and raise to fabulous height the lady’s pre-eminence. Machaut’s lover says that if he were as wise as Solomon; owned the whole world; were valiant as Alexander or Hector; had Godfroy of Bouillon’s honour, Absolon’s beauty, Job’s patience, the firmness in adversity of Judith and Socrates, Esther’s humbleness, or Abraham’s faithfulness, he would still be inadequate, fall short of worthiness to love such a lady. He disclaims in his lowliness any right even to presume to love her: Love did that, not him. The power relationship and relative status of male and female differs significantly between Machaut and Chaucer. Chaucer’s Knight is not abased and retains control of agency and initiative in choosing to love. Chaucer’s disguise of a princely mourner as a mere knight, garbed in anonymous black, is itself performative, reminiscent of occasions when the 31 32

33

E.g., repentance and related forms in MED, AW, DALF, and AND. On warnings about the primacy of public role over personal tragedy, through classical allusions, in one of Chaucer’s sources for BD, see Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature (Oxford, 2003), pp. 77–9. Here and subsequently, quotations are presented in accordance with The Book of the Duchess, ed. Phillips, including indication of scribal midline virgule breaks; see. pp. 66–8 of that edition for discussion of their use for emphasis and speech breaks.

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high-born, among them Edward III, his sons and highest magnates, presented themselves at tournaments in disguise (albeit easily penetrable) as simple knights and/or in colours, or as figures from romance, history, or exotic locations.34 What Ormrod calls Edward’s ‘achievement in the performance of magnificence’ in the early 1360s was a grasp of symbolic signs of power in many media, including promotion of a ‘recognisably English’ court and court culture.35 Poetry that equalled literary fashions familiar in French, in this simultaneously still also francophone court, went hand in hand with spectacles and visual or architectural statements of English royal splendour. Chaucer often presents antique figures quasi-architecturally: wall-paintings in the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and Parliament, or the House of Fame’s columns with statues. Lists of names in these poems resemble rows of figures in aristocratic or ecclesiastical buildings and interiors: the Nine Worthies, classical heroes, kings, and so on.36 Ancient names confer the gleam of glamorous celebrity, ‘cristallisations de renom’ in Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet’s words.37 Indeed, P. M. Kean, exploring Chaucer’s ‘urbane manner’, suggested that Chaucer’s classical allusions, including the ‘elegant and learned’ list of suicidal ancient lovers (BD 725–39), offer, with their historical dignity, ‘distraction’ and comfort for a mourner.38 We shall also, however, consider below how surprisingly flippant colloquial tones sometimes accompany antique names. Interiority and exteriority, private and public, the human and the objective: these constantly interrelate in presentation of the poem’s two noble figures. Elements of erasure of White’s human presence are accompanied by her re-creation and idealisation as a bright image, a cluster of impressions to which citations contribute. Comparison to Esther (lines 986–8) suggests queen-like virtues and possibly service to her House, her importance in the Lancastrian dynasty, but also Esther’s typological and otherworldly transformation into both Virgin Mary and the Church.39 Several comparisons exteriorise or objectify her being. The poem’s graceful girl, singing, laughing and dancing in this life, is simultaneously figured as objects: tower of ivory (946), chess piece (681), mirror (974), bright torch (963), and, when compared to Penelope (1081), Lucrece (1082), and Esther (987), to these women within the pages of a book: the Bible (987) and Livy (1084). That ‘autentyke’ 34 35 36

37 38 39

Juliet V. Barker, The Tournament in England (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 86–91, 96–111. Ormrod, Edward III, pp. 460–1. C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT, 1999), p. 73; Anthony Emery, Southern England, Vol. 3 of Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 282, 479–81. Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Fama et les Preux: Nom et Renom à la Moyen Âge’, Médiévales 24 (1993), 35–44. Kean, Love Vision, p. 61. See Kevin J. Harty, ‘The Reputation of Queen Esther in the Middle Ages: The Merchant’s Tale, IV (E)1742–45’, Ball State University Forum 19/3 (1978), 65–8.



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  189

authority of Livy (1086) reinforces Chaucer’s comparison, also countering the widely known misogynist accusation that no Lucreces or Penelopes exist today.40 The ‘Fenix of Arabye’ (982), a particularly faraway exemplum of brightness, refutes another misogynist jibe, that good women are rare as the Phoenix or white crows.41 Chaucer’s ‘autentyk’, a colourlessly pedantic word today, draws on its stronger, livelier, Middle English sense of ‘to be believed’, ‘compelling belief’ (MED s.v., ‘autentik’ [adj.], def. 1). As elsewhere, most memorably in the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer’s assertion of female fidelity is twinned with reference to faithful records. The contrast inherent in the figure of the anonymous Knight, grieving as a private individual but surrounded by name lists that elevate his identity and situation as those of a public figure of historical significance, textualises a tension between private self and public performance that has been noted in contemporary aristocratic spectacle.42 We can correspondingly discern a re-entry into public, social identity in the final scene. The mourner is returned to the milieu and titles that represent princely status, after the dissolution of the hunt and a dialogue in which the glory and the death of the lady have been acknowledged. The Knight’s private identity, which had been imprisoned in interior consciousness and sorrowful impasse, is finally re-integrated with what his historical avatars in the name lists attest about his public identity and consequence.

Exemplarity, Blocking and Denial Deference to masculine honour may underlie a disconcerting addition to White’s comparison to ‘Penolopee of Grece, / Or … the noble wife Lucrece’ (1081–2): Chaucer blocks any association with masculine crime – rape – in Lucrece’s history: White was like ‘and nothynge lyke [Lucrece]’ (1085). After momentarily reversing the exemplary parallel, he strengthens the excision of undesired elements by firmly narrowing the signification to marital fidelity, Algate she was   as trewe as she.

(1087)

The classic example of argument by exempla in the poem is the Dreamer’s marshalling of names to condemn excessive emotional woe and its suicidal tendencies: Medea, Phyllis, Dido, Echo, Samson (lines 724–41), sharpening 40 41 42

Walter Map, De Nugis curialium, ed. M. R. James (Oxford, 1914), Book 4, chap. 3, lines 20–1, p. 146; Roman de la Rose (hereafter RR), lines 8621–4. RR, lines 8657–8, 8665. See Susan Crane’s survey of critical approaches to public and private identity, in The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, PA, 2002), pp. 122–33. On the Knight’s public versus private identities and ‘resocialisation’ see Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1986), pp. 8–15.

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his triumphalist contempt by colloquial and emphatic diction: ‘dampned’, ‘rage’, ‘which a foole she was!’, ‘ryght thus … foly’, etc. (725, 731, 734, 735–6). Dramatically, however, the Dreamer’s confident exemplarity and message are blocked. The Knight simply declines to engage with either: ‘Why so?’ quod he,   ‘hyt ys nat soo …’

(742–3)

The Dreamer’s exemplum of Socrates, teaching resistance to Fortune (lines 717–19) is similarly blocked: ‘No’, quod he,   ‘I kan not soo’.

(720)

These halts, a ‘No’ upon the flow of discourse, a point beyond which nothing can be said, resemble other moments where foregoing discourse meets a stop. Dramatic body-language appears after the Dreamer’s ‘Where is she now?’: ‘Now?’  quod he,  and stynte anoon.

(1299, my emphasis)

And after ‘What may that be?’ (1308): ‘She ys ded.’ ‘Nay!’

(1309)

Similar effects appear elsewhere in the poem. Chaucer’s description of insomnia, unlike Froissart’s in Le Paradys d’Amours, abruptly stops short of explaining its cause: ‘but that is done: / Passe we over…’ (40–1). This aesthetic of sudden halts, marking important junctures, includes ‘Therwith Fortune  seyde “Chek here!”’ (659) as well as Alcyone’s reaction: ‘“Allas!” … And deyede within  the thridde morwe’ (213–14). The narrator himself then refuses to say more (215–17). After the Knight’s long wooing speech, the lady simply ‘sayde “Nay” / Alle outerly’ (1243–4). The poem itself abruptly stops: ‘This was my swevene;  now hit ys doon’ (1334). These halts contribute to a recurrent uncertainty: knowledge and communication (and possibilities for consolation) left uncompleted. Yet this theme exists in tension with equally recurrent motifs of cleverness and education, to be considered in the next section. And name lists facilitate both strands in complex fashion. In this poem of uncertainties, what possible directions do appear cease: hunt, puppy, and hart disappear. Certainties created in source texts are absent. Machaut’s unhappy lovers may accept a narrator’s or dream’s reassurances, supported by antique authority – for example, Ceyx, Alcyone, Troy, Venus, or the Roman senators and Sibyls in La Fontaine amoureuse – but Chaucer’s unhappy lover contributes to the poem’s continued opacity towards the possibility of comfort, and he rejects exempla. Puzzlement, first introduced with the insomnia, is the message of the Dreamer’s citation of Macrobius, Daniel, Pharaoh, and Scipio: his dream will never be explained.43 Though Chaucer’s 43

RR, lines 5–20.



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  191

version of Alcyone’s story suggests knowledge of the Ovide moralisé (which treats Ovid’s tale as an exemplum), he stops short of Ovid’s metamorphosis or any moralised explication. In equivocating over exempla, and in pre-empting full knowledge, Chaucer is perhaps experimenting with an original development of the device of correctio, the rhetorical twist used particularly with exempla, of which Claudian was a notable exponent. Chaucer’s qualification of White’s resemblance to Lucrece, as ‘nothynge lyke’, is an instance of correctio: introducing a comparison complimenting the modern subject, then qualifying the similarity. Claudian’s Laus Serenae, a probable influence on Chaucer’s Legend, cites exemplary comparisons – Alcestis, Tanquil, Cloelia, Claudia, Penelope – to praise Serena, then asserts that none compete with Serena. Rejecting Helen and Dido, he cites Laodamia, Evadne, and Lucrece, chaste and devoted wives even unto death, but concludes (possibly to eliminate male culpability for their fates) by declaring Serena ‘non tu virtute minore, / sed fato meliore’: not less in goodness but superior in fate.44 In Chaucer’s words: ‘as good,   and nothynge lyke’ (BD 1085).

Juxtaposition, Speech and Song Some of the poem’s halts and swerves away from foregoing discourse are stylistic shifts. Grandeur, including the entry of antiquity into the writing, can be juxtaposed with colloquial dismissiveness: ‘No fors of hem’, ‘Algate’, ‘Algatis’, ‘passe we over’. We think of formal rhetoric as heightening the expression of emotion but, as Wolfgang Clemen observed, Chaucer’s mastery of colloquial modes, juxtaposed and integrated with elaborate rhetorical passages, underlines and vitalises emotional power and dynamically motivates sections of the Book of the Duchess.45 Interchange between formally patterned rhetorical writing and colloquialisms and speech patterns is a striking characteristic of the poem. Juxtaposition is the deepest principle of the poem’s structure. It also features within lists of antique names, and name lists form part of its mosaic of modes. Many lists contain seemingly incongruous juxtapositions, yet major themes also run across their contrasts and boundaries. Intercalated lyrics and citations function similarly in Machaut’s structures: Sarah Kay writes of inset lyrics, personifications, and classical figures all being ‘refracted’ in his dits’ ‘anthology-like’ structures.46 Cerquiglini-Toulet has explored Machaut’s 44

45 46

Claudius Claudianus, Claudian, ed. Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols (London, 1922), vol. 2, pp. 240–1, 248–51 (lines 11–33, 146–59). Chaucer and Machaut both use correctio in physical praise of a lady; see Harrison, ‘Medieval Rhetoric’, p. 442. Wolfgang Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry, trans. C. A. M. Sym (London, 1963), p. 59–63. Kay et al., Short History, pp. 76–80.

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‘aesthetic of rupture’ in the interplay between inset elements and narrative.47 The broken, disparate structure and tones of Chaucer’s poem, highlighted by early critics as youthful flaws, are in fact his individual and masterly handling of what, far from being a conventional style, was an avant-garde aesthetic, of surprise and contrast, together with narratorial experimentation, which his most inspirational contemporaries operated in works which also complimented, and clearly pleased, sophisticated patrons and audiences. Chaucer treats ancient allusions adventurously, sometimes stylistically irreverently, while simultaneously employing the splendour and dignity they confer. When Chaucer breaks open his narrative to reach back into a past which offered challenging, potentially alien, attitudes and values, at the same time as citations from it carried the frisson of functioning as instruments of contemporary power and deference, the literary language of ‘exemplary’ antiquity, far from furnishing complacent reinforcement of common established notions, seems unable in his hands not to awaken surprise, puzzlement, and a refusal of easy conclusions, on many occasions for his audience. Large themes to which antique citations contribute include the world of learning as well as European chivalry’s ancient heritage. Alongside puzzlement and uncertainty, knowledge, education, and skill are recurrent themes. Chaucer’s names introduce famed inventors of skills: Athalus, Tubal, Hippocrates, Galen, Orpheus, Tubal, Daedalus, Pythagoras (cited for both chess and music). The aristocratic lover’s skills include well-bred speech and composition. Machaut complimented patrons by attributing poems and songs to their fictional counterparts. The Remede de Fortune, particularly, foregrounds the arts of loving and composition. Chaucer attributes two songs to his Knight, borrows from Machaut’s passages on education (for example, Remede lines 1–50, 135–66), and praises aristocratic command of speech. Skills in music and speech connect with themes of healing and consolation, a cluster to which ancient names contribute (a point treated further below). The art of song, a theme in lines 462–6, 471–87, 569, 1155–82, accompanies praise for verbal skill: ‘Loo,  how goodely spake thys knyghte’; ‘so tretable, / Ryght wonder skylful and  resonable, / … for al hys bale’ (agony and rhetorical mastery coexist); and White’s ‘goodely  softe speche’, the greatest eloquence ever found, ‘So swete a sownynge  facounde’ (529, 533–5, 919, 926). The Knight’s songs are introduced through scholarly citations, ‘Lamekys  sone Tuballe’, ‘Pictagoras’, and textual auctoritas, the learned biblical summary Aurora (lines 1162–9). Yet abruptly – a species of correctio, accompanied by a typical colloquial register shift – the Knight dismisses them:

47

Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Ethique de la totalisation et esthétique de la rupture dans le Voir-Dit de Guillaume de Machaut’, in Guillaume de Machaut, Poète et compositeur (Paris, 1982), pp. 253–62.



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  193 But therof no fors   of hem twoo! Algatis, songes   thus I made.

(1170–1)

Stylistic ‘rupture’ here between the auctoritas of learned exempla and the insouciant colloquialisms of the young noble facilitates two different simultaneous effects: gracious modesty is displayed yet historical grandeur nevertheless works its magic over the aristocrat’s composition. Chaucer’s allusions to the myth of the musician Orpheus are, like Machaut’s, very complex: central to a web of themes about the artist’s skill, human pain, and the possibilities for healing/consolation. Firstly, of course, Orpheus is central to the tales of Sisyphus and Tantalus cited in lines 589 and 709 to represent the lover’s pain. Orpheus’ stilling of Hades’ tortures makes him also a symbol of possible consolation. Chaucer, Machaut, and Froissart all compare lovers’ pains to Tantalus and other infernal victims similarly imprisoned in sorrow.48 Yet note: Chaucer’s allusions to Hades’ victims, and to Orpheus as healer (in 569), remain negative. His knight declares the impossibility of healing, whereas Machaut’s Confort d’ami brings comfort to a separated lover by citing Orpheus’s successful journey into Hades (and Orpheus, like the Confort’s patron, Charles of Navarre – and like John of Gaunt – was severed from a wife). When Chaucer adopts Machaut’s description of a lover learning to lament his pain in song (lines 1155–80, cf. Remede de Fortune 357–680), does he endorse Machaut’s validation of the worth and potential comfort of poetic/musical expression, even the expression of anguish, in opposition to the Boethian dismissal of the Muses of lamentation?49 Chaucer associates Orpheus with song, love, and the possibility of healing, and also with themes of knowledge, skill, and invention, including implicitly the poet’s skill. In both Machaut’s Confort d’ami and Dit de la Harpe Orpheus explicitly represents the poet–composer, as well as lovers’ sorrows.50 Chaucer conveys this idea by juxtaposing Orpheus with other names in what is perhaps the poem’s most complex and difficult list. In this list (lines 566–72), the Black Knight combines five curiously disparate names to describe the incurability of his sorrow: ‘al the remedyes   of

48

49

50

Guillaume de Machaut, Le Confort d’ami: Comfort for a Friend, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1992), lines 2517–34; Froissart, Paradys d’Amours (in Œuvres de Froissart: Poésies, ed. Auguste Scheler, 3 vols [Brussels, 1870–72; repr. Geneva, 1977], lines 1139–46). See Sarah Kay, ‘Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French Dit’, in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 21–38; Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Poet as Musician’, in Companion to Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Deborah McGrady and Jennifer Bain (Leiden, 2012), pp. 49–66. Confort d’Ami, lines 2277–644; Machaut excises, like Chaucer, an undesired element: Orpheus’ homosexuality.

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Ovyde’, Orpheus ‘god of melodye’, Daedalus with his ‘playes slye’, and Hippocrates and Galen. All the ‘remedyes’ means presumably both Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Examination reveals several sequences of ideas running through this puzzling list. One theme connecting several names is obvious: healing. Hippocrates, Galen, Orpheus (as soother of Tantalus et al.), and the word ‘remedyes’. But what about Daedalus? And why cite Ovid’s amatory works? Their cynicism about women and love makes this seem a daring but tasteless inclusion. Is it possible that, amid his miscellany of disparate styles and modes, Chaucer interposes a little cynical, woman-sceptical wit here? Alternatively, do the five names constitute a conspectus of cures for love’s agonies, including cynicism? Another possible explanation is that Chaucer knew medieval versions combining Ovid’s Art and Remedies of Love and adding a final book that progressed from carnal to divine love.51 If this is the case, this would be a citation of great respectability, shifting from cynical to spiritual remedies for earthly pain. The likeliest solution, I think, lies in Chaucer’s juxtaposition of Ovid, ‘Orpheus  god of melodye’ and Daedalus’ ‘playes slye’. And it is a solution that helps with the puzzle of Daedalus’s presence in this list itself: after all, he is no healer. Daedalus’ subtlety, if it stands for knowledge and skill in general, may, of course suggest that these count among healing resources. Recalling Kean’s suggestion that the dignity of citations of classical heroes confers potential consolation, we might argue further that the scholarship implied by antique citations perhaps points to the consolatory idea that the world of human mental powers holds possible comfort. (Just before this passage the Knight lamented that grief has bereft him of ‘understondynge’ [565].) Daedalus and his ‘playes slye’, however, could suggest the artist/poet’s skills specifically. This would go some way to explain Daedalus’ juxtaposition with Ovid’s amatory books. For Ovid included Daedalus in Ars Amatoria 2, presenting Daedalus as a type of the poet and his art. Ovid compares himself to Daedalus as poet, artificer, and magister, educating lovers, ruefully in style, but with profound underlying seriousness and implications for the dignity of the poet’s calling which chime with the nascent assertion of this in both Machaut and Deschamps.52 If Chaucer introduces Daedalus as an exemplum of inventiveness in general, his phrasing ‘playes slye’ also fits the creations of the sophisticated court poet (570). Thus Ovid’s ‘remedyes’, joined with Ovid’s poet-parallel Daedalus and with Orpheus as melody-­composer, provide a triple sequence of ideas about the poet’s art, in the context of talk of healing. Orpheus’s description as ‘god of melodye’ elevates composition to 51 52

Heinrichs, Myths of Love, p. 37, lists examples. The Remedia itself, which uses the imagery of ‘curing’, can be seen as a wise rejection of passion. See John M. Fyler’s illuminating exploration of the Ovidian passage, in Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, CT, 1979), pp. 124–7.



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  195

a divine level (569). Implicitly and ultimately, these allusions point to poetry, including Chaucer’s poem, as having potential to heal (but never the sweeping aside of human grief) – and implies a comparison to the creations of the world’s great artificers and inventors. After all, it is Daedalus’ house (‘Domus Dedaly’) which features in the House of Fame (line 1920), that dream-vision more explicitly concerned with the poet’s role and reputation. In situ, these five names representing diverse possible consolation are, of course, rejected by Chaucer’s Knight. Nevertheless, powerful antique names exert their glamour and significances upon the text, even accompanied by denials and blockings. The poem’s recurrent naming of great inventors, those ‘first finders’ of music, medicine, chess, and other skills, along with repeated citing of authorities (Livy, Aurora, Bible, Ovid, Dares Phrygius), suggests another way that the heritage of human knowledge can console: by shedding an aura of impressive scholarship and auctoritas suitably honouring to a sophisticated implicit audience. While medieval exempla often seem devices serving traditional teaching and styles of argument, citing ancient figures excites Chaucer to often daring, even ostensibly unstable, writing, structures, and ideas, with bearing on profound human dilemmas and complexes of ideas. Daniel Poirion argued for a gradual development whereby allusions to classical figures during the long fourteenth century initially serve traditional modes of thinking, notably didactic exemplarity, but begin to be used for writing which opened up to new and freer views of human life. He cites Froissart and Christine de Pizan as bold explorers in these ventures.53 Chaucer is another writer whose creativity was particularly stimulated whenever he turned to the antique world. What we can call the Shock of the Old when it enters his working processes seems to trigger originality, energy, and quirky and disruptive writing and links.

Sorrow Medieval contemplation of ancient celebrities, in many different forms, often includes their tragic ends. The great tragedies of great figures tend to evoke a heightened emotional intensity. The medieval period, moreover, readily viewed history itself as a series of falls of great regimes. The Ubi Sunt tradition gleams with the splendour of past heroes and lovers while insisting on the fact of transience. The men and women from antiquity named in the Book of the Duchess, as it handles the subject of a great woman’s death and a great lord’s sorrow, are, however august the aura they bring to it, also acquainted with tragedy.

53

Daniel Poirion, Le Moyen Âge II: 1300–1480 (Paris, 1971), pp. 60–3.

196  Helen Phillips

When he turns to the ancients as subjects, Chaucer tends to gravitate towards the subject of emotional pain, not only in the heroes whose stories he treats on a grand scale – Troilus, Palamon, and Arcite, or the god Mars lamenting the profundities of desire’s anguish – but also his frequent inclusion of love tragedies in lists of classical citations. The Parliament’s Temple of Venus and Legend’s ballade provide obvious examples. So does the startling interruption in the Duchess when Chaucer breaks his allusion to Hector to recount Achilles’ and Antilochus’ love tragedies (lines 1065–71). The Dreamer forcefully brings fatal tragedies into the poem in lines 725–39, the list of suicides. This inclusion within the text of great celebrities’ sufferings is, arguably, a parallel to the poem’s overall refusal to proffer explicit Christian or Boethian arguments against the deep sorrows lamented throughout its pages. Philosophical implications, however, of a different kind, are raised by this acceptance of suffering into the poet’s text, without such traditional arguments. Chaucer never articulates (except in the dramatically rejected attempt by the Dreamer to offer it) any direct teaching that love’s tragedies prove the worthlessness of love. In the absence of such conventional approaches, the poem prompts the philosophical question of the worth of individuals’ consciousness and secular experience within this world: an issue central to Troilus. For the question of pain is also the question of individual, earthly consciousness. Chaucer’s handling of the poet’s role in expressing the sorrows of a lover, while voicing sympathy, never effects any dismissing of the dignity and significance of sorrow – and its expression. It is ignorance and shallowness by the Dreamer that, even briefly, makes such dismissiveness seem possible, even clever: ‘Thou woste ful lytel  what thou menyst’ (742), ripostes the Knight (indeed, the text’s absurd fiction of the misunderstood ‘fers’ makes possible that rejection of the Dreamer’s conventional answers). Sarah Kay has similarly seen Machaut as turning round the notion of ‘consolation’, accepting the expression of lamentation both because poetry enters into suffering, rather than just offering remedies for it, and because pain is itself inextricably at the core of desire; artistic expression of this, preserving the suffering in art, produces an art that refuses to discount the importance of physical, individual experience in this world.54 For Chaucer as for Virgil, who pictured, significantly in a historical ekphrasis, Aeneas’ mournful viewing of a mural of now-lost Trojan heroes, the artist’s celebration of the enduring fame of historical figures is joined to awareness of human suffering:

54

Kay, ‘Touching Singularity’, pp. 28–38.



The Unsettling Art of Chaucer’s Antique Citations  197 Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent. [the tears in things, and the nature of mortal life touches the mind]55

Virgil’s multiply resonant line includes the balm of the sympathy of others. Chaucer’s narrator offers ‘routhe’ as his last word, his last, most explicit and direct, response, upon the pain of loss. But Chaucer had already used earlier a classical citation, Ceyx, to voice simple acceptance of the grief in human life – and sympathy: ‘farewel, swete, … I praye God   youre sorwe lysse: To litel while   oure blysse lasteth.’

55

(209–11)

Virgil, Aeneid 1.462, Latin text from Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1999); my translation.

10 Response: The Book of the Duchess, Guillaume de Machaut, and the Image of the Archive ARDIS BUTTERFIELD

More, it seems, than any other of Chaucer’s works, the Book of the Duchess epitomises citation. The density of its textural tissue is noted by many of the contributors to this volume.1 It is possible to track three-quarters of its lines to other poems, largely French verse narratives.2 So well known a fact hardly bears repeating; yet there is surprisingly little discussion of what this might mean to our sense of how and why Chaucer composed the poem in this form. For although most of his poems draw directly or indirectly on what have traditionally been called ‘sources’, none does so with quite the kaleidoscopic abandon of the Book of the Duchess over such a concentrated stretch of writing. Traditional source study, by meticulously identifying the detail and range of these borrowings, and labelling them thematically and line by line, has been as distorting as it has been illuminating. We are left puzzling over the simultaneously thick stuff of reference and the minute detail of its cross-hatched character, of the way individual ‘source’ texts seem broken up into pieces and intricately recombined with utter disregard for their original linearity. Chaucer appears to veer from text to text, at one moment through word-by-word translation and at another through large-scale structural amplification or compression, and then back to the word-by-word translation. It’s not the allusiveness per se, but the seemingly random character of the citational process that catches our attention.3 1 2

3

See, for example, Wells, Knox, Strakhov, and Phillips. For the most detailed lists of parallels see James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Background of the Book of the Duchess (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), Appendix; Barry Windeatt, Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (London, 1982), pp. 167–8; and Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, ed. Helen Phillips, 3rd rev. edn (Durham, 1982; 1997), Appendix. I have been pondering the Book of the Duchess’s relationship to its French ‘sources’ ever since graduate days. See my ‘Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 33–60; ‘Pastoral and the Politics of Plague in Machaut and Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994), 3–27; ‘Chaucer’s French Inheritance’, in The Cambridge

200  Ardis Butterfield

For this reason, the Book of the Duchess also epitomises why source study fails.4 A list of parallels does not make sense of either a reading or a composing process. If we were to take the list at face value, then we would have to imagine Chaucer in a great modern library or, as Ruth Evans has wittily described, in cyberspace, as if he had (like his modern critics) too many windows open on his laptop and was cutting and pasting from his internet searches as he wrote.5 In fact, as Evans also points out, the uncanny (and of course unlikely) appropriateness of this model to Chaucer’s compositional methods should not be dismissed too swiftly. Chaucer did not have access to the internet but he did have access to the advanced memory technologies of his own period, and to take account of this is to understand something about memory that our own age keeps forgetting. Memory poverty has made us imagine that the past is locked in an enclosed and irrevocably other place. But if we connect medieval notions and practices of memory to modern ways of thinking about the unconscious we find that retrieving the past need not be the static and remote process that it is often supposed to be. As Freud, and Derrida reading Freud, show us, understanding the past is a complex matter of overlapping, even ‘paradoxical’ temporalities, produced by the condition of our present perception ‘of ourselves as embodied subjects’.6 My topic in this response essay is not the same as Evans’ (whose focus is the House of Fame and literary pasts), but I do want to look again at memory and its function in relation to traumatic pasts. For obvious reasons of elegiac remembrance, memory is all the more important to the Book of the Duchess and has been much discussed in those terms. It is taken up in this volume by Rebecca Davis and especially Jeff Espie. But there is remarkably little mention of how memory might have affected the poem’s process of composition as opposed to how it articulates mourning.7 Among the essays assembled here occur insistent questions about the blankness of the insomniac narrator and the ‘work of sleep’ at the opening of the Book of the Duchess (Barootes, Davis), the powerful emotions described and provoked by the poem (Davis, Wells, Phillips), and representations of bodily transfer and mind–body limin-

4 5 6 7

Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 20–35; and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), chap. 8. Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, ‘Rethinking Source Study’, pp. 241–4. Ruth Evans, ‘Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and the House of Fame’, SAC 23 (2001), 43–69. Ibid., p. 50. To my knowledge, there is just one article on this topic, an important but strangely overlooked essay by Mary Carruthers, ‘“The Mystery of the Bed Chamber”: Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, in Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (Madison, WI, 2000), pp. 67–87. My argument gratefully acknowledges Carruthers’ work on memory not only in this article but also in her seminal The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990).

The Book of the Duchess, Machaut, and the Image of the Archive   201 ality (Davis, Wells, Strakhov, and Knox). I will be suggesting that all these topics may be addressed by focusing on memory. Memory is perhaps the most important means of invention that was available to Chaucer and a crucial corrective to the notion that he had a pile of physical texts in front of him and was copying out little extracts piecemeal to form a new kaleidoscopic whole. So although it is undeniable that books are extremely important to the Book of the Duchess, not least because they begin and end it, I will be turning here instead to memory, towards a deeper sense of how Chaucer used, and conceived of, memory in composing the poem. We will discover that Chaucer does more than use memory technologies to compose the Book of the Duchess. He uses the experience of composing the Book of the Duchess to ponder and comment on memory, and indeed to comment on the use of memory for composing literary works. This is because the Book of the Duchess’s subject is mourning and its genre elegy. It is also because Chaucer’s deep reading in French provides him with a rich resource of sophisticated reflection on memory and composition. So we see in the Book of the Duchess evidence of Chaucer thinking hard about how the activity of composing not only draws on memory but also employs memory to filter and re-present the subject matter of a composition. Observing the fullness of Machaut’s own commentary on these topics gives him the impetus to meet the specific challenge of elegy.

Machaut’s Prologue Chaucer scholars have always paid most attention to the works by Machaut from which Chaucer appears to draw matters of plot and diction. But this emphasis has left to one side a key text of Machaut’s poetic philosophy, a succinct articulation of principles central to Chaucer and his vernacular poetic contemporaries. Machaut’s Prologue seems to have been a late-­career project of the poet to burnish his public image. He began his authorial self-fashioning in the 1350s with the first of his collected oeuvre manuscripts: altogether no fewer than 12 survive, seven of which have music (though one of these is very fragmentary).8 It seems likely that he composed the Prologue specifically to introduce BnF fr. 1584 (so-called MS A), a late copy, dated to the early 1370s.9 It is a remarkable work, and a remarkable decision. To the careful ordering of the complete works manuscripts, in itself a flamboyant gesture of poetic self-presentation through the medium of the book unequalled in medieval vernacular culture, Machaut now adds a poetic manifesto, an account 8 9

Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York, 1995), pp. 73–102. Earp gives a full list of the standard sigla. See Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 204. To my knowledge this dating has not been superseded. The Prologue occurs in full in MSS A, F, PM; the four ballades occur only in E and H.

202  Ardis Butterfield

of his own genesis as an artist in a mixed form of prose rubric, lyric, and narrative, accompanied by two exquisite half-page illuminations. MS A also contains an index, with a most unusual rubric that asserts the poet’s own desire to create order within his oeuvre. There are two sections: in the first, four ballades in matching formal pairs, in the second, 184 lines of rimes plates, the standard octosyllabic rhyming couplets of French verse narrative. Nature visits Guillaume and, in order to reveal (reveler) and praise (essaucier) the great benefits of love, charges him, in the first ballade, to make new ‘dis amoureus’ with the aid of her three children, Scens, Retorique, and Musique.10 ‘Guillaume de Machau’ (as he is named in full in each of the four prose rubrics) replies in the second ballade, humbly accepting her commission. Love, having heard Nature’s request, now enters the conversation and offers Guillaume three further children, Dous Penser, Plaisance, and Esperance, to help him with his subject matter. Once more, in a fourth ballade, Guillaume humbly and gratefully accepts. These lyric exchanges completed, Guillaume continues in narrative. He spells out the charge and his response, extending his commitment from the writing of dis amoureus to include chansonettes, double hoqués, lais, motés, rondiaus, virelais, complaintes, and balades entées, all to the praise of dames, and all with appropriate joy. Much discussed, Machaut’s Prologue nonetheless does not yield straightforwardly to interpretation.11 The beguiling clarity of its structure leaves much unanswered. For example, despite the apparent importance of Musique in the neat genealogies of poetic aid on offer, the role of music remains obscure. None of the ballades has music, and indeed it is not until Machaut expands on Nature’s command in the narrative section that non-narrative genres are even mentioned. As an introduction to the full conspectus of his multi-dimensional work as a poet and musician the Prologue is thus a little puzzlingly orientated towards his dits and non-musical works. Yet its odd relationship to the rest of his writings can be explained by its highly innovative status as a retrospective attempt to put Machaut’s life work into order: the very range of his output and its variety of material formats made this a complex proposition. The Roman de la Rose and its endlessly intriguing mid-point (discussed earlier by Knox) 10

11

The Prologue is cited from Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner, 3 vols, Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1908–21), vol. 1, pp. 1–12; translations are mine. The quoted words appear in the opening rubric (unnumbered lines). See Earp’s bibliography; more recently, Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 291–5; Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY, 2011), pp. 82–103. On the illuminations, see most recently Domenic Leo, ‘Authorial Presence in the Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts’, unpub. PhD thesis (New York University, 2005), and his ‘The Pucellian School and the Rise of Naturalism: Style as Royal Signifier?’, in Jean Pucelle: Innovation and Collaboration in Manuscript Painting, ed. Kyunghee Pyun and Anna D. Russakoff (London, 2013), 149–69.

The Book of the Duchess, Machaut, and the Image of the Archive   203 underpins much of Machaut’s complex refiguring of himself as a poet and actor in his complete-works manuscripts.12 Like Henry James’s Prefaces to his large-scale re-presentation of his novels at the end of his life, Machaut’s MS A is a knotty and convoluted material object, with layers of thought and physical effort that require deciphering. What is not anomalous about it is the thinking itself. Machaut’s individual works, as much as his collected-works codices, show someone obsessed with presenting an ars poetica. His mixed lyric-narrative dit the Remede de Fortune, with its range of fully notated inset lyric forms, is the locus classicus of a locus classicus of writing on love; his Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse spends much time expatiating on the art of writing both lyric and narrative; his Livre du Voir Dit so thoroughly thematises the art that it becomes an immersive environment in which writing poetry takes over the life it purportedly records. Master of citation, Machaut even makes his own compositions a constant echo-chamber of his art through self-citation across his oeuvre.13 If this trait is widely agreed and remarked, it is less often acknowledged that Machaut prepares the ground for his self-presentation as a poet by an equally obsessive crafting of ‘scenes of writing’. Without leaving aside the Freudian allusion entirely, this essay will spend some time showing how fully Machaut works with memory in his compositions before then turning to the Book of the Duchess and following through Chaucer’s own treatment of it. Like Sturm-Maddox in this volume, I will be emphasising the Remede’s crucial role in his thinking. I will suggest that Machaut does far more than follow standard procedures or techniques. Tracking some of his moves reveals some of the novel ways this vernacular master conceived of units of memory, of recollection, of the way formulas turn into form, of the intricate skeins of repetition that gather up thought and turn it into poetry.14 From here we then see new ways of grasping the structural arts of Chaucer’s poem.

12

13

14

The term actor (‘L’acteur’ in French) is consistently used in the Rose manuscripts as a speaker marker, apposed to L’Amant, and this practice is taken up by the Machaut scribes. For discussion and references see David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First ‘Roman de la Rose’ (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 74–93; Silvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY, 1987), p. 91, n. 18 and Appendix A. Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, chap. 6, esp. pp. 256–65; Yolanda Plumley, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut (Oxford, 2013). For seminal earlier accounts of Machaut’s contribution to fourteenth-century poetics see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-­ Toulet, ‘Un Engin si Soutil’: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle (Geneva and Paris, 1985) and La Couleur de la mélancolie: La fréquentation des livres au XIVe siècle 1300–1415 (Paris, 1993). I build here on a range of my work addressing citation and repetition, of which the two most relevant essays are ‘The Art of Repetition: Machaut’s Ballade 33 “Nes qu’on porroit”’, in Close Readings: Essays in Honour of John Stevens and Philip Brett, ed. Tess Knighton and John Milsom, spec. issue, Early Music 31 (2003), pp. 346–60, and ‘Afterwords: Forms of

204  Ardis Butterfield

Scenes of Writing Machaut’s Prologue has usually been viewed as an instance of medieval vernacular poetic theory, or, as Nicolette Zeeman puts it, one of a number of ‘elaborate allegories of literary composition’.15 Here, I would like instead to stress its nature as an image of the archive. Its placement at the head of Machaut’s MS A, after the index with its conspicuous assertion – ‘Vesci l’ordenance que G. de Machau wet qu’il ait en son livre’ [Here is the arrangement that Guillaume de Machaut wants his book to have] – gives it the status of a proleptic vision of Machaut’s compositional memory. The dits and songs, notated and un-notated, that fill out the book’s pages are enleafed for the reader’s view as the output of his lifelong mental efforts. The Prologue captures the prior, yet also all-encompassing, state of his mind. Here, he says, is the wellspring of his creative energies. As the fountain in the centre of the first miniature indicates, this is the source of all the subject matter, form, order, and invention to come. The Prologue is Machaut’s memory archive; it outlines his ‘reading, remembering mind’. If the codex to come is the ‘deliberate compositional “gathering”, a vast collation of matter held together by associations of various sorts’,16 then this introductory matter to MS A is both index and contents page to Machaut’s mental library of recollection. My suggestion is that for Chaucer (and other vernacular writers) it may also have functioned as a living model. Machaut shows how to give order to invention, form to matter, and form, shape, and expression to the first-person voice. Ferrand long ago pointed out how striking it is that these introductory portraits are not of a patron but of the author himself.17 We cannot know whether Chaucer actually saw MS A in the flesh, but the possibility that he came across the Prologue in some version is high. One detail stands out: Machaut’s use of the verbs viver and s’aviver (animate). As the refrain rhyme of his second ballade (‘Tant qu’en ce mond vous plaira que je vive’, lines 36, 45, 54), vive sounds out six times in the lyric, paired twice with soutive, then

15 16 17

Death’, in New Approaches to Medieval Genre, ed. Shannon Gayk and Ingrid Nelson, spec. issue, Exemplaria 27/1–2 (2015), 167–82. Zeeman, ‘Imaginative Theory’, in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford, 2007), 222–40 (at p. 225). Carruthers, ‘Mystery’, p. 80. Cited in Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 204. This contrasts markedly with the presentation frontispieces of Christine de Pizan manuscripts, for example, such as BL Harley MS 4431. On the ‘performance of authorship’ in her 54 surviving author-manuscripts, see Charlotte E. Cooper, ‘Ambiguous Author Portraits in Christine de Pizan’s Compilation Manuscript, British Library, MS Harley 4431’, in Performing Medieval Text, ed. Ardis Butterfield, Henry Hope, and Pauline Souleau (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 89–107.

The Book of the Duchess, Machaut, and the Image of the Archive   205 with s’avive.18 Whether Chaucer is responding directly to this verb or not, the combination of the double author portrait, the repeated self-identification in the rubrics as ‘Guillaume de machau’, along with the idea of subtle animation, coalesces into something very like the shape shifting moves in the Book of the Duchess between narrator and dreamer, between patron and author, and the ingenious vivification of Ceyx’s drowned body by Morpheus. In short, Machaut models a practice of creation that becomes key to Chaucer’s own selections of significant literary artifices to express the curious imaginative boundaries between real and literary bodies. And to underline the connection here between creation and memory, Machaut’s site of recollection is turned by Chaucer into a moment of brilliantly sensitive dream memory-work. Alcyone is able to comprehend the truth of her morbid imaginings by seeing as well as hearing the dead speak, by having – through a poet’s manipulations – the memory of her husband’s physical body and the sound of his voice come to life. The act of composition is nowhere more precisely rendered than this, in the animation of memory images to communicate across the border from the lifeless to the living. The Prologue is only one of many ‘scenes of writing’ across Machaut’s works. For reasons of space I will select a few of particular relevance to the Book of the Duchess. In Carruthers’ discussion of bedchamber scenes she characterises the standard posture of literary invention as one of ‘lying prostrate and weeping “in silence”’.19 Machaut places such postures into his narrative just before or just after an inset song. A classic example is the complainte in the Remede: the lover, having retreated to a secluded spot, becomes deeply dejected; after his song he is so overwhelmed by grief that he strays far from ‘sens, de memoire, et de force, / Et de toute autre vigour’ [the way of sense, memory, energy, and every other power] and falls into a trance (1491–2). He likewise falls asleep just before the chant royal (line 1980), and this is even spelled out in the rubric: Miniature 14) Commant l’Amant s’endort en ooiant chanter Esperance Lors d’une voys clere et serie, Douce, sainne, en tel melodie Commença son chant delez mi, C’un petitet m’i endormi; Mes ne fu pas si fermement Que n’entendisse proprement Qu’ainssi commença par revel Jolïement son chant nouvel: … (1977–84) 18

19

Cf. Remede, line 2253 (‘Nature soubtille oeuvre …’). All citations from the Remede, by line number, are taken from Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, ed. and trans. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens, GA, 1988). Translations are also from this edition, unless otherwise indicated. Carruthers, ‘Mystery’, p. 73.

206  Ardis Butterfield [How the Lover falls asleep listening to Hope sing: Then at my side in a sweet, harmonious voice – clear and rich – she began her song with such a melody that soon I fell asleep; but not so deeply that I didn’t accurately hear how her new song began beautifully and gaily…]

At the end of the song, he ‘is still dozing – but not deeply, because I had heard what she’d sung and said: rhyme, music, and words’: Et je qui encor soumilloie – Non pas fort, car bien entendoie Ce qu’elle avoit chanté et dit En rime, en musique, et en dit –

(2097–2100)

Most commentators (myself included) have treated such moments as matters of psychology, or literary source criticism, shaped by Machaut’s guiding text in the Remede: Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae.20 But I think Carruthers is right (via her discussion of Chaucer) to point out that one of the primary associations here is also with the moments of despair that precipitate composition. The salient elements comprise a figure alone usually in a park or garden, feelings of intense despondency or high emotion, a trancelike state (which can include sleep, dreaming, or bodily swooning), and an inset song, with or without music. Frequently depicted in Machaut and also Froissart, such scenes often include very detailed references to memory-­ work.21 A striking example occurs after the ballade sung by Esperance, where L’Amant immediately takes steps to memorise the whole piece, words and music (2902–6). He adds, moreover, that he made sure to fix the image of it within his memory so thoroughly, with all his five senses, that he could not remember anything else except, of course, his lady herself: Et pour ce que ne l’oubliasse, Failloit il que la recordasse; Mais si com je l’ymaginoie En mon cuer et la recordoie De si tres bonne affection, Que toute l’inclinacion Des .v. sens que Dieus m’a donné 20 21

Hoepffner was the first to give a full account of Machaut’s indebtedness to Boethius in the Remede (Machaut, Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. xix–xxxii). All of these features, apart from the inset songs, are from the Rose (which in fact contains a detailed description, if not citation, of a carole in the garden); fourteenth-century narratives deriving from the Rose are described in detail by Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, and Pierre-Yves Badel, Le ‘Roman de la Rose’ au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’œuvre (Geneva, 1980). Inset songs are a particular trait of Machaut’s dits (Remede, Fontainne Amoureuse, Behaingne, Voir Dit), and Froissart’s (Le Paradys d’amour, La Prison amoureuse, L’Espinette amoureuse, Le Joli buisson de jonece).

The Book of the Duchess, Machaut, and the Image of the Archive   207 Y estoient si ordené Que n’avoie cuer ne penser Que lors peüsse aillours penser, (Fors tant qu’adés me souvenoit De celle dont mes biens venoit)

(2907–18)

[And so I’d not forget it, I had to imprint it upon my memory; but as I fixed its image in my heart and imprinted it with such ardour, that every disposition of my five God-given senses was so intent upon it that I had no heart or desire to think of anything else (except that I constantly remembered her who was the source of my good)]

Here we have a precise description of memorial practice applied directly to vernacular song composition. There are many such.22 With the lai, L’Amant is reduced to a state of stupefied inarticulacy after he has performed it to his lady (‘Je perdi maniere et vigour’ [I lost my composure and strength, 707]), and the same language (later repeated in relation to the complainte) is used to describe his mental state of being deprived of his memory and his five senses (‘Me tollirent si le memoire / Et les .v. sens’, 711). He wanders off, as if in a dream (‘com se fust songe’, 748). Despair, over and above its other meanings, is here either the precondition or the response to song. These specific scenes are supplemented by other kinds of images of the archive. Perhaps the most obvious (and often quoted) is the opening of the Remede, where Machaut describes 12 principles that anyone who wishes to learn a skill (‘Cilz qui veult aucun art aprendre’, 1) must follow. Here the memory image is of a white and polished tablet (‘la table / Blanche, polie, qui est able / A recevoir … Ce c’on y veult paindre ou pourtraire’ [27–30]), and of wax (‘comme la cire / Qui sueffre dedens li escrire, / Ou qui retient forme ou emprainte, / Si com on l’a en li emprainte’ [31–4]).23 Some indication of the importance of this motif to Chaucer may be gleaned from realising that there are six instances of ‘twelve’ things in the Book of the Duchess.24 Less obviously, I suggest that other types of memory cues representing different 22

23

24

Examples of references to memory or composition, or both, in relation to inset songs, include Remede, lines 431–4, 681–714, 897–904, 1481–93, 1977–84, 2039–49, 2097–100, 2849–56, 2893–923, 2934–46, 2965–8, 3011–12, 3037, 3145–8, 3390–400, 3447–50, 3497–506, 3593–604, 3609–33, 3650–2, 3705–40, 4107–8; Fonteinne amoureuse, lines 1047–52; Paradys, lines 69–74, 842–50, 860–6, 878–87, 897–902, 1036–42, 1066–78, 1355, 1445–50, 1602–7, 1653–68, 1713–16. There are many more in the rest of Froissart’s dits: for example, L’Espinette amoureuse, lines 919–26, 1463–8, 1494–1502; La Prison amoureuse, lines 290–4; and Le Joli Buisson, lines 1135–7. Cf. Duchess, ‘as a white walle  or a table’ (780) and the essays by Espie and SturmMaddox in this volume. I cite throughout from Phillips’ edition, retaining its use of gaps to indicate scribal midline breaks. ‘tene fete or twelve’ (420), ‘ten vers or twelfe’ (463), ‘oures twelve’ (573), ‘ferses twelve’ (723), halwes twelve’ (831), ‘oures twelve’ (1323).

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kinds of generative compositional impulse inform both Machaut’s writing and Chaucer’s. Some are single images (the feather bed) or sets of images (trees); some are single lines (‘alwey deynge  and be not dede’, 588); some are sets of rhetorical tropes (hunt, chess); others are an archive of emotions, bodily transfer, and last, but not least, song. Examples (some of which I take from the earlier essays in this volume) include the Machauldian list;25 the use of contraries;26 the use of key terms (blysse27, Fortune, sentement28); specific visual details (thick soft untrodden grass, the little dog, the chessboard29, the hunt, clasped hands and bowed head, to name a few); meta-narrative (the description of the journey as private, the reference to the songe, to a swoon, the artfulness of what the Lover sees; references to technical poetic complexities). Souvenir is a transparent but telling instance of one such key term: Machaut makes memory an overt presence in his text through a range of strategies. For example, the Prologue trio of Dous Penser, Esperance, and Plaisance is updated throughout the Remede by the substitution of Souvenir for Plaisance. In Le Jugement du Roy de Behaingne there are ten instances of the word ‘souvenir’ and some of them fall at key structural junctures. At the work’s mid-point, no less, in the heart of the debate between the knight whose lover has betrayed him and the lady whose lover has died, the knight explains how it is Memory that is the source of his despair. In a line that has been overlooked for its significance to the Book of the Duchess, he bursts out: En mon desir d’esperance n’a point, Mais a li joint desespoir si a point Que j’en serai matez en l’angle point    Du Souvenir …

(1005–8)

[My desire has no hope at all, But despair is so confounded with it I will be checkmated   By memory]

The metaphor (caught in the sharp angle) is from chess.30 Here we seem to have evidence of deep memory-work at work. As a reader, Chaucer is 25 26 27 28 29 30

For example, Behaingne, lines 468–70; see Phillips’ essay in this volume. See this long passage in the Remede’s complainte, lines 1129–60, echoed in the Duchess, lines 599–617. Davis. Knox. Barootes. This reading is correctly translated in Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer with Domenic Leo and Uri Smilansky, in Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, I: The Debate Series, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Yolanda Plumley (Kalamazoo, MI, 2016). See DMF s.v. ‘mater’ (def. 2): mater en angle point (to

The Book of the Duchess, Machaut, and the Image of the Archive   209 bombarded by the word. And then the memorial image itself, the dead metaphor of a visual victory in black and white, penetrates Chaucer’s own mental store and re-emerges in a poem where it becomes a ruling image of loss and a figure for death.31 Machaut’s description a few lines later of how ‘Cilz Souvenirs, par son engin soubtil, / Me ramentoit le viaire gentil / Et le gent corps pour qui mon cuer exil’ [This memory, by its subtle artifice, recalls to me the well born face and the noble body for whom my heart breaks] (1029–31; my translation) spells out the mechanism, announced in the Prologue, by which his, and Chaucer’s, poetry is generated. It is tempting to suppose that Chaucer recollected one further Machauldian line as he was conceiving his ingenious project. Near the end of the Remede, just after his lady has granted him her love, L’Amant decides to retreat out of the limelight to avoid drawing attention to what has just happened, and starts to chat inconsequentially with the other ladies nearby. They ask him lots of questions: et je leur respondoie Moult loing de ce que je sentoie, Car tousdis leur fis dou blanc noir (3883–5) [And I replied quite remotely from what I was feeling, for I constantly made white black for them] (my translation)

On the principle that the composing poet gathers up significant details, especially visual ones, to form his mental res, it seems possible that this line might have reinforced the chess image, which, as Carruthers demonstrates, is itself ‘preeminently a game of memory’.32 Carruthers has already done the work of analysing the conventional features of mnemonic invention in the Book of the Duchess. However, her account can be taken further, especially in the light of Machaut’s extensive and overt treatment of memory. My argument is that Chaucer repeatedly homes in on the act of composition, partly through lacing his poem with scenes of writing – the opening bedchamber with its sleepless narrator, the cave of sleep, the bedchamber of Alcyone, the dreamer’s bedchamber in the May morning, the hunting forest, the oak tree, the castle grounds, the final bedchamber – and partly through generating his own writing through further associational mnemonic techniques that link these scenes. Like Machaut, Chaucer gives

31

32

win at chess). This was missed by Wimsatt and Kibler (p. 110), who translate it as ‘Memory is what most torments me’. See Maud Ellmann, ‘Blanche’, in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn (London, 1984), pp. 99–110, and Jane Gilbert, Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (Cambridge, 2011), chap. 5. Carruthers, ‘Mystery’, p. 80.

210  Ardis Butterfield

us many images of the archive, and connects and inter-­connects these images with chains of recollective verbal repetition. There is room to concentrate on only one scene in detail. In dialogue with Knox’s essay, I choose the encounter by the oak tree, perhaps the heart of the poem.33 James Wimsatt was right to stress the importance of La Fonteinne amoureuse to the atmospheric encounter between the Man in Black and the dreamer.34 Yet many of the scene-setting details are common to most of the passages where lyrics are set into the dits: as we recall, the dreamer walks away from the tree where the hunt has faltered and follows a puppy down a little-used path, thick with flowers, into a wood. The Amant in the Remede, trying to find a hidden place to lose himself after his debacle with the lai follows little-used paths deep into the Parc de Hesdin (lines 783–6). Likewise, in the Fonteinne amoureuse the poet and his lord go off alone to find a fountain in a beautiful park, there to sleep and dream (1291–1301).35 Chaucer’s dreamer notices the ‘man in blak’ with his back to the huge oak; failing to notice the newcomer’s arrival, the man hangs his head, utters the ‘compleynt’ or ‘lay’ with a ‘dedely sorwful soune’ and then falls into a cold faint. L’Amant, filled with intensely conflicting emotions before he performs his lai, hangs his head like a bear (‘comme ours’, 396); after the complainte he falls into a trance, as if death were close upon his heels (lines 1493–5).36 In all these instances, the same narrative frame produces new compositions that either require or engender specific emotional and physical conditions. Much ink has been spilt on the ‘problem’ of the Man in Black’s little song. Seeing song, through Machaut, as a reflexive moment of memorative composition, offers a new perspective on this scene. As in so many instances of song in Machaut’s dits, an allusion is made to the necessity of remembering it in detail: He sayed a lay,   a maner songe, Withoute noote,   withoute song, And was thys,   for ful wel I kan Reherse hyt:   ryght thus hyt began

(471–4)

Further, Chaucer takes an important lesson from Machaut’s use of associative chains of repetition. As I discuss elsewhere, Machaut builds up his compositions through intricate patterns of self-citation. We can see the Book of the Duchess in a similar light. Like the refrains that lace Machaut’s works, 33 34 35 36

Carruthers notes that ‘“heart” was a commonplace synonym for “memory”’ (ibid., p. 73). Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, p. 117. Cf. Roman de la Rose, lines 99–130ff, where the lover sets off alone to find a stream and then the walled garden. The lord in the Fonteinne amoureuse falls asleep directly after the poet has told him that he overheard his complaint (lines 1540–44). For other examples of swooning, see Behaingne, lines 213–30, 440–4.

The Book of the Duchess, Machaut, and the Image of the Archive   211 Chaucer sets his own refrain into his elegy, using it to structure the dialogue between the Man in Black and the dreamer: ‘Thou woste ful lytel   what thou menyst: I have loste more   than thow wenyst.’

This sad, inhibited, and rebarbative couplet appears three times: first, to counter the dreamer’s dismissal of the chess metaphor; second, to cue the knight’s recall of the first exchange he had with his lady and his first song; and, third, as an act provoking recall that doubles back on the narrative that has just been told: ‘Bethenke how  I seyde herebeforne …’ (1304).37 Why the three-fold repetition? Each refrain citation highlights moments of important recall and also triggers further associations. As has often been remarked, Chaucer structures the poem by reiterating moments of loss and speechlessness. He articulates this through figures that are in a state of transition between consciousness and sleep, between life and death. The opening distraught and sleepless narrator maps onto the distraught Alcyone, woken from sleep by the drowned body of her husband, who maps onto the melancholic swooning Man in Black, who in turn maps onto the dreamer, finally woken by the bell into his condition as narrator and, with new resolve, poet. Each figure is projected from, and instrumental within, a scene of writing: the narrator is composing the poem, Alcyone is caught up in an effort to create an utterance from a corpse, the Man in Black is composing his song. And of course the dreamer’s final metamorphosis back into the poem’s narrator and indeed author triggers the whole poem in a retrograde looping action. The closed circuit structure of the Book of the Duchess prompts several conclusions. As we have seen, Chaucer, like Machaut, embeds within the poem multiple repetitive features.38 The proliferation of compositional archives gives the work a sense that it is being repeatedly regenerated: texts are revived, stories retold, songs reheard and re-performed. The refrains, and myriad other repetitions of word, line, image, and motif, create a circular rather than linear structure for the poem. We could say that the Man in Black’s lai acts like the end of a stanza rather than a moment in an unfolding narrative. In the ensuing dialogue we keep returning to the same point, to the same words, to the same truth of loss. And the earlier circling back from Alcyone to the narrator takes us back to a third hidden lyric: the poignant words of another sleepless figure as he calls to his wife from beyond the grave (lines 201–11). The cold despair of compositional torpor triggers poetry, and memory.

37 38

Lines 743–5, 1137–8, 1305–6. Among many examples, ‘I am but ded’, ‘ful pitous pale and nothyng red’ (five times), ‘defaute of slep’ (five times), ‘fers’ (six times), ‘hert(e)’ (twenty-eight times), ‘reherse’ (four times), ‘song’ (eleven times), ‘soun’ (five times).

212  Ardis Butterfield

In being composed, the new poetry is not only generated from recollection but stimulates a focused commentary on that process and work of recollection. Machaut’s deep engagement with the art of love writing required only subtle adjustments for the purposes of elegy. Like Machaut, Chaucer creates careful order in his work: the formal shapes he creates for loss are invented from feeling (sentement) and intelligence (entendement) (Prologue, lines 135–36). Seemingly no musician himself, I suggest, in conclusion, that Chaucer even appropriates for elegy Machaut’s foregrounding of Musique. One of the recurrent motifs in the Book of the Duchess is his playing off of sound and silence: the quiet of late-night reading, the ‘wonder depe’ sleep of the cave of Morpheus cut through by the sharp cries and loud horn of Juno’s messenger, the noisy singing of the birds as he wakes into his dream, the hunting horn, the Man in Black’s spoken song (a ‘dedely  sorwful soune … withoute noote,  withoute songe’), the silent presence of the dreamer encroaching on the knight’s silent but fierce internal debate (‘he spake noght,  But argued  with his oune thoght’) and the dreamer’s gentle intervention (‘nothyng lowde’), the abrupt halt of speech after the third refrain, and the final castle bell tolling 12, waking the dreamer to silent reflections on what he has just dreamed. This sound archive links associatively with composition to make one final case for elegy. Chaucer teaches us the rhetorical and emotional power of silent song. The Book of the Duchess touches our heart strings by creating a form for bereavement in which memory sings, but sotto voce, and in the painfully silent landscape of a composing mind. Like Machaut, once more, he understands that sound is the ultimate way of giving words life, of living through words. If the comfort of music is not directly present in the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer acknowledges, through Machaut, that the sound of feeling (sentement) is sometimes eloquent enough.39

39

‘m’estudie / Mis en faire chansons et lays … selonc mon sentement’ [I learned to compose chansons and lays … according to my feelings] (Remede 402–5).

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Index acedia (accidia)  43, 56, 92–3; see also Sloth Adams, Jenny  48 Aeneid (Virgil)  99, 108, 171, 172, 196–7; see also Trojan allusions affect defined 74 as intensity  74 translations of  72–9 affect theory  7, 73–4 Ahmed, Sara  86–7 Alcuin (Bishop)  35 Alcyone; see Ceyx and Alcyone, legend of allusion in Book of the Duchess 159 to the death of Blanche  11 to dits amoureux  81 Freudian 203 internal 11 to jeupardyes  48 to myth and classical literature  34, 48, 171, 180, 181, 185, 188, 192, 193–6 to Remede de Fortune 7 to remembering in detail  210 Amores (Ovid) 140 Anderson, Robert  16 Anelida and Arcite (Chaucer) 18 antique citations in Book of the Duchess  181, 182, 184–9, 192 of love tragedies  195–7 questions raised by  177–8 in Remede de Fortune  187, 192 apathy  72, 75, 87 Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas)  35, 92, 107 Ars Amatoria (Ovid)  194 Ars Poetica (Horace)  160–1 auctoritas  192, 193, 195 August eclogue (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender)  112, 116–17 Augustine of Hippo  35–6, 44, 50, 58 De anima 57

Austin, J. L.  83 Ayenbite of Inwyt  31, 40 n.26, 44 Bartholomaeus Anglicus  56–7, 58 Bell, John  16 Benoît de Sainte-Maure  180, 182 Bernard of Chartres  162 Berry, Jean/John (duc de)  122, 143, 144 n.28, 158, 163–4 Black Knight as alter ego  72 as Chaucer  154 use of chess metaphor  35, 43, 47–8, 113–14, 133, 148, 208–9, 211 cognitive development of  108–9 complaint of  73, 85–6, 89–91, 147–8, 150, 151–4, 167–8 confabulation of  85, 87 grief of  34, 43–5, 48, 69, 79, 105–6, 120, 133–4, 146–8, 173, 193–4 identity of  154 idleness of  33, 34–5, 43–4 as John of Gaunt  153–4, 173 link to Alcyone  81–2, 84, 109–10, 112 love for Lady White  47, 67–8, 87–8, 106–7, 119, 124–30, 132–3 lyric insertions of  25, 45, 80, 129, 134, 147–8, 149, 150–1, 152, 154 melancholy of  211 mourning of  44–45, 47, 107–8, 187 narrator’s encounter with  77 recounting his tale  146–7 revealing his love to Lady White  128–30, 132–3 song of  23, 25, 25 n.30, 45, 80–1, 112, 151, 153, 154, 155, 210–11 telling his love to the Dreamer  124–6, 128 see also John of Gaunt Black Prince (Edward)  120 Blake, N. F.  20

Blanche of Lancaster  7, 11, 13, 16, 18, 80, 173, 185–6 Black Knight’s memories of  68, 106 Chaucer’s resurrection of  67–9 commemoration of  67, 109, 124, 134 death of  7, 11, 13, 18, 109, 119, 122–3, 133–4, 152, 153 idealization of  68, 106, 134 John of Gaunt’s mourning for  80, 105, 106, 108, 173 monumental grave for  13, 97, 106, 108, 134 n.44 political significance of  185–6 see also White (Lady) Boccaccio, Giovanni  180 Boethius  139 n.11 Consolation of Philosophy  39 n.24, 130–1, 134, 206 Bonne of Luxembourg  119, 122, 124 Book of Shrift  31–3, 31 n.5, 44 Book of the Duchess (Chaucer) dating of  13–14, 123 imitatio in 167–73 influence of other styles on French 199 Machaut 123–4 influence of other works on Fonteinne Amoureuse  158, 160, 210 Remede de Fortune 124–30, 151, 192–3, 210 Roman de la Rose 139–42 legend of Ceyx and Alcyone in  61, 64, 65–6, 68, 73, 79, 83–4, 144–5, 169–71 name lists in  181 narrator readings of  149–50 original circulation of  13–14 possible titles of  14–16, 14 n.5, 16 n.8, 119 problem of voice in  146–7 proem to  29–31, 43 publication history  13–18 booklets 17 boundary-crossing  54, 57, 58, 61, 65 Bronson, Bertrand T.  1, 181 Burrow, Colin  4 Butler, Judith  76 Butterfield, Ardis  3, 45, 121, 123, 150

Index  231 Calin, William  166 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline  191–2 Ceyx and Alcyone, legend of Alcyone association with Chaucer’s narrator 104–5 dream of Ceyx  71–2, 86, 99 melancholia of  77 request of Juno  53, 54, 63, 64 in Book of the Duchess  61, 64, 65–6, 68, 73, 79, 83–4, 144–5, 169–71 Chaucer’s version of  65, 79–80, 88–9, 102–5, 109, 135, 157–8, 169–71, 190–1 in Fonteinne Amoureuse  61, 63–4, 66–7, 80–1, 143, 157–8, 163–7, 169 and the function of touch  99–100 Machaut’s version of  165–6 in Metamorphoses  53–4, 65, 71–2, 80, 82, 97, 98–9, 104, 109, 157, 165 moralizing reading of  86–7, 102 narrator’s reaction to  46, 69 in Ovide Moralisé  157, 165 role of Morpheus in  4–6, 59, 144–6, 155 inhabiting Ceyx’s drowned body, 54, 65–8, 80, 82, 102, 145–6, 157–60, 169–71, 174, 205 messenger sent by Juno  54, 55, 80, 135, 145 taking the form of Ceyx  64, 65, 68, 80, 99, 164, 165, 167, 169 and Spenser’s Daphnaïda 73 transformation of the lovers  65, 71, 72, 84, 101, 165 Chalmers, Alexander  16 Chance, Jane  180–1 Charles of Navarre  193 Chaucer, Geoffrey biography linked to manuscript annotation 13 early life and court service  120–1 evocation of scenes of writing 209–10 as father of English poetry  115 use of imitatio by 160 Machaut’s influence on  201–12 and the poet-patron relationship 162

232  Index use of antique citations  178–9 Chaucer, Geoffrey, works of Anelida and Arcite 18 Complaint of Mars  16, 18 Complaint of Venus  16, 18 “Complaint to Pity”  16 “Complaynt d’Amour”  16 Franklin’s Tale  32 n.8, 151, 181 House of Fame  16, 17, 18, 25–6, 55, 59, 60, 88, 108, 181 Legend of Good Women  13, 14, 16, 18, 37, 173, 178, 189 Man of Law’s Tale  13, 103 Melibee, Tale of 55 Parliament of Fowls  16, 18, 177 Parson’s Tale  55, 56 Romaunt of the Rose (translation)  25 Squire’s Tale  32 n.8, 56 Troilus and Criseyde 153 Wife of Bath’s Tale 181 see also Book of the Duchess Cheney, Donald  110 chess  31, 32, 33, 40, 40–1 nn.27–28, 41, 42, 45, 49, 50 Black Knight’s use as metaphor  35, 43, 47–8, 113–14, 133, 148, 208–9, 211 Chopinel, Jean  141; see also de Meun, Jean Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 77 Clanchy, Michael  155 Claudian, Laus Serenae 191 Clemen, Wolfgang  191 Colin Clovts Come Home Againe 112 colloquialisms 191 Complaint of Mars (Chaucer)  16, 18 Complaint of Venus (Chaucer)  16, 18 “Complaint to Pity” (Chaucer)  16 complaints/complaintes  72–3, 80–1, 84, 85, 90–1, 151–2 of Alcyon  110 of the Black Knight/Man in Black  73, 85–6, 89–91, 147–8, 150, 151–2, 153–4, 167–8, 173 in Fonteinne Amoureuse  144, 158, 163–4, 167 intransigent emotion of  90–3 in Remede de Fortune 205–6 “Complaynt d’Amour” (Chaucer)  16 Complaynte of a Loveres Lyfe (Lydgate)  49, 50

confabulation  78–9, 85, 86, 87 Confessio Amantis (Gower)  107, 150 Confessions (Augustine) 35 Confort d’ami (Machaut)  193 Connoly, Margaret  48 consolation  7, 30, 44, 47, 90, 124, 133, 134, 190, 192, 193–6 Cooley, Franklin D.  47–8 Copeland, Rita  166 correctio  191, 192 cosmological harmony  39 n.24 counterfeit  67, 68, 153, 155, 159, 173–5; see also imitatio courtly literature  46, 119 Cursor Mundi  31, 31 n.5, 33, 34, 37–8 Daedalus 194–5 De anima (Augustine) 57 de Deguileville, Guillaume  48–9 de Lille, Alain  34 de Lorris, Guillaume  34, 37, 139, 140–2, 146, 150 de Meun, Jean  139, 140–2, 146, 180; see also Chopinel, Jean De proprietatibus rerum (Bartholomaeus Anglicus)  56 De Young, Rebecca Konyndyk  92 death; see also tombs of Blanche of Lancaster  7, 11, 13, 18, 109, 119, 122–3, 133–4, 152, 153 Chaucer’s position on  156 and the counterfeit voice  155 and historical time  113 longing for  124 and sleep  67–9 debate  146, 180, 183, 208 devotional literature  6, 30–1, 33 Dido  88, 100, 101, 103, 104, 148, 179, 189, 191 Dinshaw, Carolyn  112 Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse; see Fonteinne Amoureuse under Machaut, Guillaume de, works of Dit de la Harpe (Machaut)  193 Dit du Bleu Chevalier, Le (Froissart) 159 dits amoureux (French)  81, 82, 88, 143, 152, 178 Book of the Duchess as  7, 152

by Chaucer  184 with lyric insertions  143, 152 by Machaut  119, 142–3, 202, 210 Dorigen 178 d’Orléans, Charles  152, 179 dream poetry  178, 183 dreams and dreaming as memorial art  69 as metaphors  52 nightmares 36 telling of  60–1 as transitional space  71 dream-visions of Chaucer  2–3, 5, 17, 51 in Fonteinne Amoureuse 59 as genre  58 in House of Fame 195 as inward sight  58, 63 in Les Échecs amoureux 33 as link to literary past  173 n.32 medieval tradition of  36, 51, 58 Morpheus’s role in  4, 5–6 sleep as prerequisite for  52, 57, 58 theorists of  57 Du Laurens, André  76 Earp, Lawrence  122 Échecs amoureux, Les 33 Eclympasteyr 171 Eco, Umberto  1 Edmondson, George  112 Edwards, Robert R.  46, 98 elegiac poetry  150, 152, 155, 212 elegy; see also mourning Book of the Duchess as  98, 174, 201, 211–12 English  80, 88 as language of woe  73 limitations of  7 lyric 151–2 Ovid’s use of  140 as poetic genre  84 in Roman de la rose  140–42, 155 Ellis, Steve  134 emotion language  73–4 emotional community  82 emotions 77–8 emotives 82–3 epitaphic writing  99–101, 103, 107, 108, 109–16 Esther (biblical)  187, 188

Index  233 Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville)  35 Evans, Ruth  200 exempla lists; see antique citations; name lists exemplarity  178, 179 fables as dreams  46–7 and games  6 literary 34 medieval attitudes toward  35–8, 44, 48–50 related to dreams  36 n.21 restorative  29–30, 34–5, 47 salvific influence of  46–7 Faerie Queene (Spenser)  5, 90 Falco, Raphael  115 Ferster, Judith  169 fiction; see fables Fonteinne Amoureuse; see under Machaut, Guillaume de, works of Franklin’s Tale (Chaucer)  32 n.8, 151, 181 French, W. H.  151 Froissart, Jean  5, 44, 76, 121, 154, 195 Le Dit du Bleu Chevalier 159 Le Paradys d’Amours  5, 44, 76, 123, 154, 159, 171, 172 Fumo, Jamie  174 Fyler, John  123 games  6, 35, 40–2, 44; see also chess Gaunt, John of; see John of Gaunt gender production  76–7 genealogy, literary  115–16, 167 Gibson, Jonathan  91 Gluttony 42 Gorges, Ambrosia  113, 114 Gorges, Arthur  90, 110, 112, 114, 115 Gorges, Thomas  114 gossip 34 Gower, John  32 n.8, 107, 121 Granson, Oton de  151 graves; see tombs Greene, Thomas  161–2 Gregg, Melissa  74 Gregory the Great  35 Grennen, Joseph  168 Handlyng Synne (Mannyng) 40 Hansen, Elaine Tuttle  68 Hardman, Phillipa  106, 134

234  Index Harrison, Benjamin S.  183 Havely, Nick  51 Heinrichs, Katherine  182 Heroides (Ovid)  91, 97, 100, 103–4 Dido  100, 179 Hero and Leander  100 Hypermnestra 100 Phyllis and Demophon  100–1, 103–4 Hilton, Walter  60 historiography, affective  112 homosexuality 76–8 Horace, Ars poetica 160–1 House of Fame (Chaucer)  16, 17, 18, 55, 59, 60, 88, 108, 181 Caxton’s conclusion to  25–6 Howard, Anne  114 Howard, Lady Douglas  90, 110, 114 Huot, Sylvia  130 identity assertion of  135–6 chivalric 184 dynastic 185 gendered 76 literary 112 masculine chivalric  183, 184 private vs. public  189 and voice  7, 136, 146–7, 154, 155–6 idleness  7, 30–3, 43–4, 45, 49, 50 Iliad (Homer) 99 imitatio; see also counterfeit in Book of the Duchess 167–73 classical theories of  160–3 in Fonteinne Amoureuse 168–9, 172–3 resisting the counterfeit  173–5 and the role of Morpheus  4, 159–60 verbatim examples in Fonteinne Amoureuse 163–7 innamoramento 127 infidelitas 186–7 insomnia; see sleeplessness intertextuality  3–4, 6, 159 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 35 Isle of Ladies (anon.)  16 Jacob’s Well 31 Jaeger, Stephen  127

John II of France  119, 120, 122 John of Gaunt  5 n.10, 80, 122, 134, 136, 152, 158, 185–6, 193; see also Black Knight Black Knight as  153–4, 173 construction of tomb for wife  13, 97, 106, 108, 134 n.44 grief over wife’s death  11, 105, 153–4 mourning of  80, 154 payment of annuity to Chaucer  13 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 162 Jordan, Robert M.  182 Jugement du roy de Behaigne (Behaingne) (Machaut)  133, 146, 159, 208 juxtaposition 191–5 Kay, Sarah  191, 196 Kean, P. M.  188 Kelly, Douglas  131 Kiser, Lisa  51–2 Kittredge, George L.  139, 181 Knapp, Ethan  116 Kruger, Steven  77 Lamentations (Mathéolus)  180 Lancaster, Blanche of; see Blanche of Lancaster Laus Serenae (Claudian) 191 Lawton, David  137, 138 Lears, Adin Esther  34, 43, 85 Legend of Good Women (Chaucer)  13, 14, 16, 18, 37, 178, 189 Prologue to 173 Leitch, Megan  55–7 letters, between lovers  100–101, 103 liminality  4, 200–1 Livre de la fonteinne amoreuse (Machaut); see Fonteinne Amoureuse under Machaut, Guillaume de, works of Livy 188–9 Louis d’Anjou (France)  122 love courtly  77, 132, 133 God of  140–41 of the Man in Black for Lady White  47, 119, 124–30, 132–3 pathos of  98 pedagogy of  127 personified 127–8

lovesickness  43–4, 75–6, 158 Lydgate, John  48, 50 Complaynte of a Loveres Lyfe 49 Temple of Glass 16 lyrics advice to readers  144 n.27 Black Knight’s songs  45, 134, 143, 147, 149, 150 in French dits  143, 152, 178 as insertions  143, 154, 191, 203, 211 lamenting death of beloved  151 laments 163 of love  120, 121, 129, 152–3 by Machaut  202, 203, 204 placement of  143 rhyme scheme in  25 title given to  16 written by patrons  144 n.28 Machaut, Guillaume de Chaucer’s critique of  174–5 on consolation  196 influence on Book of the Duchess 123–4 influence on Chaucer  129, 201–12 on memory  201–3, 207–9 songs and poems of  112, 120–1, 122, 129, 151, 179, 184 use of lyric in  152–3 writing elegy  212 Machaut, Guillaume de, works of Confort d’ami 193 Dit de la Harpe 193 Fonteinne Amoureuse antique citations in  190 and ars poetica 203 complainte in  163–4, 167 duc de Berry mentioned in  122 examples of imitatio in 163–7, 168–9, 172–3 and the Fountain of Love  164, 166, 172, 175 influence on Book of the Duchess  52, 80, 123–4, 136, 157, 158, 160, 210 legend of Ceyx and Alcyone in  55, 163–7 and medieval rhetoric  8 Morpheus’s role in  5, 61–7, 157 and the poet-patron relationship 162

Index  235 use of lyric in  153 voicing selves in  142–4 Jugement du roy de Behaigne 133, 146, 159, 208 Lay du plour (motet)  151 Prise d’Alexandre  123 n.19 Prologue  8, 131, 201–5, 208–9 Remede de Fortune antique citations in  187, 192 Chaucer’s familiarity with  209 compared to Book of the Duchess 125–32 complaint in  205–6 exordium 125–6 influence on Book of the Duchess  7, 119–20, 123, 124–30, 151, 159, 192–3, 210 as lyric-narrative dit  203 on the notion of sentiment  153, 155 revelation of love to the lady 129–30 role of Amour  127–8 role of Esperance  131–2, 133, 134, 206 title of  134 Voir Dit (Livre de)  5, 203 Macrobius 36 Malebranche, Nicolas  88 Man in Black; see Black Knight; John of Gaunt Man of Law’s Tale (Chaucer)  13, 103 Mannyng, Robert  40 manuscript issues missing lines of text  12, 19–21, 20 n.24, 22 rhyme scheme irregularities  24–5 scribal colophon  15 scribal error  26–7 scribal nota  23, 24–5 textual discrepancies  21, 26 Massumi, Brian  74 Mathéolus, Lamentations 180 Matter of Troy  46, 166, 172; see also Trojan allusions McCall, John P.  181–2 McGerr, Rosemary P.  60 melancholia/melancholy  20, 42–3, 45, 75–8, 92, 211 memory and creation  205 in Fonteinne Amoureuse 207

236  Index in Machaut’s works  201–3 and music  208 and poetry  211–12 and traumatic pasts  200–1 memory cues  8, 207 Metalogicon (John of Salisbury)  162 Metamorphoses (Ovid) Cave of Sleep episode  4–5, 61–3, 79, 81, 170, 209 Chaucer’s treatment of  102 influence on Book of the Duchess  7, 180 Machaut’s allusions to  167 metamorphosis of Ceyx and Alcyone  101, 104 Orpheus and Eurydice  99 theme of separated lovers in  98 see also Ceyx and Alcyone, legend of mind-body problem  63, 68, 200–1 Molins, Pierre de  122 Moral Epistles (Seneca)  161 Morpheus  4–6, 5 n.10, 7 asked to intercede for the narrator  65 in Book of the Duchess 169–70, 171, 174 in the Cave of Sleep  4–5, 61–3, 79, 81, 170, 209 and the concept of imitatio 159–60 in Fonteinne Amoureuse 61–6 inhabiting Ceyx’s drowned body  54, 65–8, 80, 82, 102, 145–6, 157–60, 174, 205 Juno’s command to  84 role of  4–6, 99, 102, 144–6, 155, 157–8, 159, 165 taking the form of Ceyx  64, 65, 68, 80, 99, 164, 165, 167, 169 see also sleep mourners Aeneas 196 Alcyone 145 Black Knight  44–45, 47, 107–8, 187 Cupid 140 John of Gaunt  80, 154 mourning; see also elegy for a dead love  114, 117 in Spenser’s works  90, 91, 111–12 as theme  201 work of  82, 84 Muscatine, Charles  2

music 184 attribution of  192 Black Knight’s song  23, 25, 25 n.30, 45, 80–1, 112, 151, 153, 154, 155, 210–11, 212 composition of  120, 121, 129, 184, 207 healing potential of  192, 193, 195 as idle pastime  38, 49, 121 of Machaut  120, 129, 151, 179, 184, 201, 202, 204–6 and memory  208 of Orpheus  193 and silence  212 vernacular song  206–7 myth Ariadne 103 Chaucer’s allusions to  34, 182, 193 Daedalus 194–5 Dido  88, 100, 101, 103, 104, 148, 179, 189, 191 Hero and Leander  100 Hypermnestra 100 Medea 179 medieval allusions to  179 Orpheus and Eurydice  99, 193 Phyllis and Demophon  100–101, 103 Tantalus 48 see also Ceyx and Alcyone, legend of name lists  177–8, 181; see also antique citations narrative poetry  154; see also poetry narrator readings  149–50 Ngai, Sianne  74, 78 Nolan, Barbara  182 occupatio  78, 84, 88–9, 91, 169 Odyssey (Homer) 99 Olson, Glending  78 Orator’s Education, The (Quintilian)  161 Ormrod, W. Mark  185, 188 Orpheus, myth of  99, 193–4 otium 33; see also idleness Ovid  4–5, 7, 62, 80 Amores 140 Ars Amatoria 194 Heroides  91, 97, 100–101, 103–4, 179

Remedia Amoris 194 see also Metamorphoses (Ovid) Ovide Moralisé  80, 86–7, 102, 157, 165, 167, 170, 171, 191 palinode 180 Palmer, J. J. N.  123 Palmer, R. Barton  61, 208 Paradys d’Amours, Le (Froissart)  5, 44, 76, 123, 154, 159, 171, 172 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer)  16, 18, 177 Parson’s Tale (Chaucer) 56 patronage system  162–3, 174 Paul the Apostle  58–9 Pearsall, Derek  120 Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, Le (de Deguileville)  48, 50 penitential literature  30–1, 50 Phillips, Helen  51 Phillips, Susan E.  33–4 Piers Plowman (Langland)  42, 44 piety, tactile  111 Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, The 48, 50 Pizan, Christine de  152, 195 poet-patron relationship  160, 162, 164, 167 poetry courtly  80, 119 dream  178, 183 elegiac  150, 152, 155, 212 as engraving on a tomb  108 French  121–2, 123 healing potential of  195 medieval 137 as memorial art  69, 106–9 and memory  211–12 narrative 154 occasional  6, 164, 174 promenade 91 see also elegy Poirion, Daniel  195 Prior, Sandra Pierson  168 Prologue (Machaut)  8, 201–5, 208–9 promenade poem  91 queer space  77–8, 89 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education 161 Rasmussen, Mark  84

Index  237 Reason and Sensuality 33 Reddy, William  73, 79, 83 refrains  93, 110, 122, 204, 210–11, 212 Regement of Princes (Hoccleve) 60 Remede de Fortune; see under Machaut, Guillaume de, works of Remedia Amoris (Ovid)  194 remedy  7, 133, 193–4 repetition  44, 45, 66, 81, 109, 162, 185, 203, 210–11 rhetoric ancient and medieval  8 argument by exempla  189–90 in Book of the Duchess  2, 106, 108, 181–3, 191, 192 Chaucer’s use of  208, 212 connectio 191 correctio  191, 192 imitatio  159, 160, 167 name lists  8, 178, 179, 181–2, 183 occupatio  78, 84, 88–9, 91, 169 rhyme scheme  21, 24–5 Robertson, D. W. Jr.  43 Roman de la Rose death of Guillaume de Loris  150 on dreams  27 game of chess  47–8 influence on Chaucer  7, 136–7, 155, 172 influence on Machaut  202–3 innamoramento scene  127 narratorial bodies in  138–42 stained glass depictions of  46, 108, 172 Roman de Troie (Benoît de SainteMaure)  182, 185 romans antiques 182–3 Rosenwein, Barbara  82 Russell, J. Stephen  68 Salter, Elizabeth  119 Sedgwick, Eve  78 Seigworth, Gregory  74 self-citation  179, 203, 210 Seneca Letters to Lucilius 77 Moral Epistles  161, 162 sexuality  77, 180; see also queer space Seys and Alcyone; see Ceyx and Alcyone, legend of

238  Index Shepheardes Calender (Spenser)  109, 112, 116–17 silence  101, 106, 116, 205, 212 Simpson, James  33–4 Singer, S. W.  16 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 150 Skeat, W. W.  139 sleep as boundary crossing  57–8 clarifying power of  63 and death  67–9 medieval attitudes toward  55–7 meridial and post-prandial  55, 57 restorative properties of  57 transformative potential of  63, 65–6 work of  7, 55, 61–7 see also Morpheus sleeplessness  29, 30, 45, 51, 52, 57, 58, 75, 123 Sloth  31, 33, 42, 43, 44; see also acedia solipsism  43, 45 sorrow, examples of  195–7 souvenir 208; see also memory Spearing, A. C.  137, 138, 149–50, 155 Spenser, Edmund Daphnaïda  7, 73, 90–3, 97–8, 109 Alcyon’s complaint  109–12, 113–14 Alcyon’s grave  112–13, 117 Faerie Queene  5, 90 literary relationship to Chaucer  98, 115–16, 117 Shepheardes Calender  109, 112, 116–17 Squire’s Tale (Chaucer)  32 n.8, 56 St Benedict’s Rule  35 St John, Michael  43 Statius, Thebaid  170, 171 Stewart, Kathleen  81 Stow, John  11, 13 Tale of Beryn, The 42 Temple of Glass (Lydgate)  16 Thebaid (Statius)  170, 171 Thomas Aquinas  35, 92, 107 Thynne, William  14, 16, 17, 20 textual editing by  25–7 Tinkle, Theresa  179 tombs of Alcyon  110–11, 112–15, 117

of Alcyone  97, 101, 109 of Blanche of Lancaster  13, 97, 106, 108, 134 n.44 in Heroides 100–101 of Iphis and Araxarathen  107 poetry as engraving on  108 touch figurative  98–100, 110, 113 relationship with piety  111 translatio  7, 184 translation of affect  7, 71, 72–3, 75, 79, 83–5, 88–91, 93 of French texts  25, 33, 48, 82, 84, 87, 88, 123, 199 Trevisa, John  56 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer)  153 Trojan allusions  46, 166, 172, 180, 184–6, 190 Achilles  187, 196 Aeneas  88, 99, 171, 179, 184, 196 Aeneid  99, 108, 171, 196–7 Anchises’ ghost  99 Antilochus  187, 196 Cassandra 186 Creusa’s ghost  99, 171 Hector  187, 196 Priam 186 stained glass depictions  46, 108, 172 Ubi Sunt tradition  195 Urry, John  16 utterance constative 83 from a corpse  211 emotional  8, 73–4, 75, 77, 89, 93 identification of self with  145 performative 83 ventriloquism  8, 68, 142, 146, 154–5, 159 vernacular religious texts  33–4, 40, 48 vernacular song  206–7 vernacularity  3, 4, 5, 36, 102, 180, 182, 201, 204 Virgil 196–7 Virgin Mary  38, 188 vision as illumination  130 voice in Book of the Duchess 146–7 in Fonteinne Amoureuse 144



Index  239 and identity  144, 154, 155–6 literary 137–8

Wenzel, Siegfried  33 White (Lady) allusions to  11, 47, 67, 69, 106–7, 112, 120, 173, 188 compared to antique examples  188–9, 191 compared to religious examples 188 see also Blanche of Lancaster Wife of Bath’s Tale (Chaucer) 181 Williams, Deanne  80, 82

Williams, Raymond  82 Wimsatt, James  1, 124, 133, 210 writing epitaphic  99–101, 103, 107, 108, 109–16 as memorial art  69, 109 monumental  99–100, 108 scenes of  209–10 Wyclif, John  41 Zeeman, Nicolette  204 Zerilli, Linda  75, 76 Zumthor, Paul  154

CHAUCER STUDIES I II

MUSIC IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER, Nigel Wilkins CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS’ TRADITION, J. A. Burnley III ESSAYS ON TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Mary Salu IV CHAUCER SONGS, Nigel Wilkins V CHAUCER’S BOCCACCIO: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, edited and translated by N.R. Havely VI SYNTAX AND STYLE IN CHAUCER’S POETRY, G. H. Roscow VII CHAUCER’S DREAM POETRY: Sources and Analogues, edited by B. A. Windeatt VIII CHAUCER AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY, Alastair Minnis IX CHAUCER AND THE POEMS OF ‘CH’ in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, edited by James I. Wimsatt X CHAUCER AND THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF FAME, Piero Boitani XI INTRODUCTION TO CHAUCERIAN ENGLISH, Arthur O. Sandved XII CHAUCER AND THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, David Wallace XIII CHAUCER’S NARRATORS, David Lawton XIV CHAUCER: COMPLAINT AND NARRATIVE, W. A. Davenport XV CHAUCER’S RELIGIOUS TALES, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson XVI EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MODERNIZATIONS FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES, edited by Betsy Bowden XVII THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Charles A. Owen Jr XVIII CHAUCER’S BOECE AND THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF BOETHIUS, edited by A. J. Minnis XIX THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EQUATORIE OF THE PLANETIS, Kari Anne Rand Schmidt XX CHAUCERIAN REALISM, Robert Myles XXI CHAUCER ON LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND SIGHT, Norman Klassen XXII CONQUERING THE REIGN OF FEMENY: GENDER AND GENRE IN CHAUCER’S ROMANCE, Angela Jane Weisl XXIII CHAUCER’S APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES, Anne Laskaya XXIV CHAUCERIAN TRAGEDY, Henry Ansgar Kelly XXV MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Peter G. Beidler XXVI CHAUCER AND COSTUME: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue, Laura F. Hodges XXVII CHAUCER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VISIONS, Kathryn L. Lynch XXVIII SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [I], edited by Robert M. Correale wtih Mary Hamel

XXX XXXI

FEMINIZING CHAUCER, Jill Mann NEW READINGS OF CHAUCER’S POETRY, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard XXXII THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHAUCER TRADITION, Simon Horobin XXXIII ETHICS AND EXEMPLARY NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER AND GOWER, J. Allan Mitchell XXXIV CHAUCER AND CLOTHING: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Laura F. Hodges XXXV SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [II], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel XXXVI THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN: CONTEXT AND RECEPTION, edited by Carolyn P. Collette XXXVII CHAUCER AND THE CITY, edited by Ardis Butterfield XXXVIII MEN AND MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec XXXIX IMAGES OF KINGSHIP IN CHAUCER AND HIS RICARDIAN CONTEMPORARIES, Samantha J. Rayner XL COMEDY IN CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO, Carol Falvo Heffernan XLI CHAUCER AND PETRARCH, William T. Rossiter XLII CHAUCER AND ARRAY: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works, Laura F. Hodges XLIII CHAUCER AND FAME: Reputation and Reception, edited by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall XLIV CHAUCER’S DECAMERON AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Frederick M. Biggs

Chaucer Studies

Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess

This volume, the first full-length collection devoted to the Book, argues powerfully against the prevalent view that it is an underdeveloped or uneven early work, and instead positions it as a nuanced literary and intellectual effort in its own right, one that deserves fuller integration with twenty-first-century Chaucer studies. The essays within it pursue lingering questions as well as new frontiers in research, including the poem’s literary relationships in the sphere of French and English writing, material processes of transmission and compilation, and patterns of reception. Each chapter advances an original reading of the Book of the Duchess that uncovers new aspects of its internal dynamics or of its literary or intellectual contexts. As a whole, the volume reveals the poem’s mobility and elasticity within an increasingly international sphere of cultural discourse that thrives on dynamic exchange and encourages sophisticated reflection on authorial practice.

Contexts and Interpretations

The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s first major poem, is foundational for our understanding of Chaucer’s literary achievements in relation to latemedieval English textual production; yet in comparison with other works, its treatment has been somewhat peripheral in previous criticism.

Chaucer’s

Book of the Duchess Contexts and Interpretations

JAMIE C. FUMO is Professor of English at Florida State University.

COVER IMAGE: Morpheus bringing sleep to a man in bed; Christine de Pizan, L’Épîtr e Othéa. © The British Library Board. London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fol. 130v.

Edited by Jamie C. Fumo

CONTRIBUTORS: B.S.W. Barootes, Julia Boffey, Ardis Butterfield, Rebecca Davis, A.S.G. Edwards, Jeff Espie, Philip Knox, Helen Phillips, Elizaveta Strakhov, Sara Sturm-Maddox, Marion Wells.

Edited by Jamie C. Fumo