The Historical Setting of Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess."
- Author / Editor
- Robertson, D. W., Jr.
The Historical Setting of Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess."
- Published
- John Mahoney and John Esten Keller, eds. Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 165-95.
- Description
- Assesses BD as a late-medieval "public funerary poem" rather than a portrait of psychological grief, interpreting the Black Knight as a generic, Boethian figure deprived by fortune, rather than as John of Gaunt, and discussing the character Blanche as a conventional figure, drawn from French poetic conventions. Like the Black Knight, the narrator represents an aspect of "everyone who loved" the Duchess of Lancaster, consistent with the chivalric sentiment of the poem.
- Contributor
- John Mahoney, ed.
John Esten Keller, ed.
- Alternative Title
- Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations