Blanche, Two Chaucers and the Stanley Family: Rethinking the Reception of "The Book of the Duchess."

Author / Editor
Meecham-Jones, Simon.

Title
Blanche, Two Chaucers and the Stanley Family: Rethinking the Reception of "The Book of the Duchess."

Published
Critical Survey 30.2 (2018): 94-119.

Description
Questions whether BD circulated in the fourteenth century and whether it was commissioned by John of Gaunt as an elegy for his wife. The mid-fifteenth-century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16 bears the arms of a court functionary, John Stanley of Hooton, who had contact with "a cultural milieu centred on the Duke of Suffolk." That the manuscript contains both BD and HF "may result from Suffolk's wife Alice Chaucer making available material from her grandfather's personal papers."

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess
House of Fame
Manuscripts and Textual Studies