Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Backgrounds of the "Book of the Duchess."

Author / Editor
Wimsatt, James I.

Title
Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Backgrounds of the "Book of the Duchess."

Published
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

Physical Description
ix, 186 pp.

Series
University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 43.

Description
Demonstrates Chaucer's extensive dependence upon French love poetry, tracing the development of "dits amoreux" from Guillaume de Lorris's portion of the "Roman de la Rose" to Chaucer's contemporaries and identifying where in BD Chaucer was influenced by the "Roman" and works by Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart. In images and details, the "Roman" is pervasive and Froissart's "Paradys d'Amours" inspired Chaucer's "dream machinery." Four of Machaut's poems are the models or sources of sections of BD.

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations