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Christian Affirmation in The Book of the Duchess
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
Chaucer's elegy, The Book of the Duchess, has been read in the past either as an exercise in exclusively human consolation without religious meaning or—by the patristic critics—as so rigidly iconographic that the obvious dramatic situation has been sacrificed to accommodate patristic truths. Chaucer's real intention is more divinely directed than the former and more humanly directed than the latter. The poem offers Christian consolation complementary to the dramatic situation by weaving images of the resurrection into the warp and woof of mute pity. The recurrence of sleeping images, for example, in the case of the Dreamer himself and in the case of Ceys and Alcione, functions as a salubrious intermission between an anguished consciousness and a redemptive awakening. The repetition of horn blasts, both in the underworld episode and the hart-hunting scene, suggests the resurrectional trumpet of the New Testament. And the hunting scene, ambiguously involved as it is with the hart, suggests through the echoic use of resurrectional diction from the Canticle of Canticles further Christian affirmation about the mystery of immortality.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969
References
1 I exclude here the Parson's Tale and Chaucer's Retraction from those works mentioned above because they are not, strictly speaking, narrative and because we cannot expect Chaucer's obliqueness to extend to his literature of knowledge as well as to his literature of power. I am convinced, however, that much work remains to be done with those tales that are sicklied o'er with uncharacteristic Chaucerian religiosity. I suspect that Chaucer is telling us something about the religious exhibitionism of their tellers.
2 Chaucer's Early Poetry, trans. C.A.M. Sym (London, 1963), p. 47.
3 “ The Book of the Duchess Re-opened,” PMLA, lxvii (1952), 863–881; reprinted in Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward Wagenknecht (New York, 1959), pp. 271–294.
4 Bronson, p. 293.
5 For a characteristic view, see Clemen, p. 49.
6 Chaucer's Major Poetry, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1963), p. 3. All subsequent references to Chaucer's poetry will be to this volume.
7 “Chaucer's Prologue to Pilgrimage: The Two Voices,” ELH, xxi (1954), 1–16; reprinted in Wagenknecht, pp. 3045.
8 “Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde,” PMLA, lxxii (1957), 14–26; reprinted in Chaucer Criticism, II: Troilus and Criseyde & the Minor Poems, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame, Ind., 1961), pp. 196–210.
9 John Lawlor, “The Pattern of Consolation in The Booh of the Duchess,” Speculum, xxxi (1956), 626–648; reprinted in Schoeck and Taylor, ii, 232–260. This essay is eminently satisfying as a reading of the limits to which human consolation, devoid of religious connotation, has been pushed in Chaucer's elegy.
10 Fruyt and Chaf (Princeton, N. J., 1963).
11 The thrust of patristic criticism is too well known to be covered bibliographically here. The manifesto of the school, of course, is D. W. Robertson's book, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, N. J., 1963).
12 Fruyt and Chaf, p. 10.
13 “Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The Opposition,” in Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (New York, 1960), p. 2. Italics mine.
14 See Donaldson, pp. 14–15, and in the same collection, Charles Donahue, “Summation,” pp. 78–80.
15 Robertson has pointed out that for the Fathers (St. Augustine in particular) these considerations were subordinate to whether or not figurative language led to the intellectual discovery of truth. See A Preface to Chaucer, pp. 52 ff. I find it hard to accept, however, that Chaucer would ever have sacrificed poetic integritas for doctrinal truth.
16 Fruyt and Chaf, p. 45.
17 Lawlor, p. 243.
18 Lawlor, p. 245.
19 Lawlor, p. 257.
20 For a contrary view, see M. Angela Carson, O.S.U., “Easing of the ‘Hert’ in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review, I (1966-67), 157–160.
21 Chaucer and the Roman Poets (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), p. 10.
22 Fruyt and Chaf, p. 46.
23 See Baugh, p. 25, n. 1312.
24 Joseph E. Grennen, “Hert-Huntyng in the Book of the Duchess,” MLQ, xxv (1964), 136.
25 Grennen, p. 138.
26 Baugh, p. 10, n. 368.
27 Baugh, p. 10, n. 353.
28 Fruyt and Chaf, pp. 110–114.
29 D. W. Robertson, Jr., “The Doctrine of Charity in Medieval Literary Gardens,” Speculum, xxvi (1951), 43–45.
30 R. E. Kaske, “Patristic Exegesis: The Defense,” in Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, pp. 52 fi.