'The Book of the Duchess'
- Author / Editor
- Cherniss, Michael D.
'The Book of the Duchess'
- Published
- Chap. 9 in Michael D. Cherniss, ed. Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1987), pp. 169-91.
- Description
- Two factors have prevented BD from being recognized as a Boethian Apocalypse: its elegiac nature and its debt to French love vision. Chaucer reshapes the "Boethian structure" in various features: the troubled first-person narrator, the dialogue, the device of the misread interpolated exemplum from "reading a book," the narrator's assumption of a role of authority, the Knight's complaint, humanization of the narrator, and the motif of Fortune.
- In combining the philosophical, educational Boethian genre with the topical eulogy, Chaucer has "exploited both the emotional tendencies of the genre and its ironic tendencies." BD is not an allegory.
- Alternative Title
- Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess.