The Book of the Duchess

To ask whether Chaucer's dream visions operate within a consciously and hortatively Christian context has rarely been seen as a credible procedure. Though Robertson and Huppé offered an energetic exegesis of the Book of the Duchess and the Parliament of Fowls and Koonce applied the Princeton approach to the Book of Fame, the domain of the poems has generally been seen as insistently secular. The earliest of the poems, so far always agreed to be the Book of the Duchess, initiates such a position with some determination, startlingly excluding any thoughts of afterlife for the dead duchess and finding immortality only in her literary memorial, an especially curious procedure since it seems that the underlying purpose of the text is to rationalize the duke's selection of a new wife. To feel assured that his last duchess is in heaven might have been an easy path to rationalizing a successor.

This chapter will argue that while these three dream visions are effectively secular, they recurrently raise the possibility of a spiritual domain, but where Dante and Petrarch, Chaucer's contemporary thematic influences (Boccaccio is a textual influence), transcend the secular with the spiritual, especially love, Chaucer consistently juxtaposes the secular and the spiritual, the classical and the Christian in complex tension, where the classical and the secular is the essential domain of the poetry, but is put under question by recurrent reference to the implicit, even off-stage, voice of Christianity.

Though it is true that the Book of the Duchess is firmly, even obsessively, secular, it should be recalled more than is usual among Chaucerians that the source of the secular amatory vision, Le Roman de la Rose, is also a major source of Christian learning and devotion, at least as it is massively completed by Jean de Meun, and Chaucer must have been well aware from there as well as from his reading in Dante and Petrarch that secular devotion can readily be the path to an even more transcendent form of love. But the Book of the Duchess seems to set its face firmly against such heavenly recidivism.