An Aristotelian Ideal: The Beauty and Virtue of Blanche in Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess."

Author / Editor
Morgan, Gerald.

Title
An Aristotelian Ideal: The Beauty and Virtue of Blanche in Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess."

Published
Roman Bleier, Brian Coleman, and Clare Fletcher, eds. Memory and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World (New York: Peter Lang, 2022), pp. 121-53.

Description
Explicates the rhetorical, conventional, and philosophical aspects of the combination of physical beauty and moral virtue in Chaucer's portrait of Blanche in BD, "a triumph of the poet's art." Clarifies similarities and differences between Chaucer's portrait and its source in Machaut's "Judement du roy de Behaigne," and explains how Chaucer's idealization reflects Aristotelian and Ciceronian notions of virtue.

Alternative Title
Memory and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World

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