Chaucer's Self-Portrait in the "Book of the Duchess."

Author / Editor
Severs, J. Burke.

Title
Chaucer's Self-Portrait in the "Book of the Duchess."

Published
Philological Quarterly 43 (1964): 27-39.

Description
Re-examines the narrator's eight-year sickness in BD, surveying previous commentary, and arguing that, unlike in Chaucer's French sources, the illness is insomnia rather than love-sickness and that God rather than a paramour is his only physician. As a "non-lover" in the poem, Chaucer uses this contrast with the Black Knight as a means to lead to consolation.

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