'Taking Keep' of the 'Book of the Duchess'

Published: Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson, eds. Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 167-78.

Description: Muscatine's "Gothic form" applies to BD with its "linear series of discrete episodes" and foci, as well as its shifts in viewpoint, style, and voice. Interpretations move in a hermeneutical circle without resolution: from parts to whole, from whole to parts.; Lynch reviews various readings and argues that (1) the BD text encourages syntheses between waking/reading and dreaming/reawakening and (2) through ironic perspective the reader unifies BD by opposing correct models to states of misunderstanding and spiritual imbalance.