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The Book of the Duchess

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SOURCE: "The Book of the Duchess," in Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems, edited by A. J. Minnis et al., Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 73-90.

[Minnis is a scholar of Medieval Literature and the author of many notable works including Chaucer and the Pagan Antiquity and Chaucer's Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius. In the following excerpt, Minnis uses historical information and analyses of verse form, rhetoric, and style to praise Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess.]

Blanche of Lancaster died on 12 September 1368, perhaps of the plague. Two major monuments were constructed to preserve her memory. One was a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, this being (as far as we know) his first substantial composition; he was probably in his mid-twenties at the time of Blanche's death. The other was the work of her husband, John of Gaunt, the third surviving son of King Edward III. In 1374 he commissioned from master mason Henry Yevele a splendid alabaster tomb, surmounted by sculptures of the duchess and himself. Perpetual masses were to be said for her soul at an adjoining altar, and a memorial service held on 12 September of each year. Gaunt's will contained the directive, 'My body to be buried … beside my most dear late wife Blanche, who is there interred.' And that was done. However, the tomb of Gaunt and Blanche, which was located in the north arcade of the choir of old St Paul's cathedral church in London, perished in the Great Fire. Chaucer's poem has survived. Is it a record, however idealized, of a genuine love-affair, or an elaborate piece of prince-pleasing which plays fast and loose with the facts, assuming that the poet knew them? Many critics have felt obliged to speculate on the nature of the royal relationship, since on it hangs—or at least they have made to hang—their views on the negotiations between artifice and life, conventional discourses and emotional integrity, which are made by the Book of the Duchess.

It has been argued that Gaunt's first marriage was dictated by political expediency every bit as much as his second, to Constance of Castile. Worse still, in some medieval accounts he appears as an inveterate womanizer: having fathered an illegitimate daughter before he met Blanche, during the time of his marriage to Constance he took Katherine Swynford as his mistress (they were to marry in 1396). Indeed, it has even been suggested (though hard evidence is lacking) that this affair began while he was married to Blanche. Katherine had been one of Blanche's ladies-in-waiting and the governess of her daughters. Chaucer could hardly have been unaware of such events, if it is true that his wife Philippa was the sister of Gaunt's long-time mistress.

One would give much to know what the poet had in mind as he wrote the Book of the Duchess and as he looked back on it in later years. But that knowledge will, of course, never be forthcoming, and in the absence of such intimate biographical detail we may isolate the appropriate critical issues by means of a modern meditation on a medieval tomb—not Blanche's lost tomb, to be sure, but one belonging to the Howard family, once earls and countesses of Arundel, which may be seen in Winchester Cathedral. Philip Larkin's poem "An Arundel Tomb" raises questions concerning the artistic imitation (or is it illusion?) of feeling and the needs of the audience which confronts such an image, questions which lead us into vital regions of the aesthetics of Chaucer's poem.

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat

What these people really felt for each other has also become 'blurred,' as the poem will make abundantly clear. In what sense do they 'lie in stone'? The earl's left-hand gauntlet is empty, and

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

But this serves to perplex as well as please. Is this a true or false image of historical reality? 'They would not think to lie so long', the repetition of 'lie' underlining the double meaning of the word: the sculptures lie together there as part of the tomb, and yet they may be perpetuating an untruth. (The fact that the hand-clasp is the result of later 'restoration' of the tomb serves to reinforce Larkin's point!) The next line, 'Such faithfulness in effigy,' is similarly ambiguous. That particular effigy could be an accurate representation of genuine fidelity; yet, taken in its entirety, the phrase also suggests something grimly static and cold, the life-affirming quality of fidelity in love being impossible to preserve artificially.

The role of the artist, the sculptor responsible for this fabrication, is then considered. Maybe the holding of hands was simply a grace-note ('A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace') which he added on his own initiative (though of course he had been paid to display his skill), in the hope that its rarity would aid the memory of the beholders. If so, it would seem that time has reversed such priorities. Now tourists stare uncomprehendingly at the Latin names 'around the base,' not being able to understand this dead language. What seems to be familiar, what they fancy they recognize, is that hand-clasp; here is something which transcends temporal and linguistic differences. 'Only an attitude remains'—the configuration of the sculptures, existing irrespective of, and maybe even despite, what the original attitudes of the medieval lord and lady may have been. It seems to affirm that human love is durable. Certainly, that is what (the poem's assumed) 'we' want to believe; what is seen on the tomb appears

But the poem will not allow 'us' to luxuriate in such a sentiment, tempting though that may be. It persists in asking, does love survive, in general, and is this what has happened in the case of the Howards, whose identities are lost in the past?

Time is not passive; it has not merely permitted the effigy to travel unhindered in its 'supine stationary voyage' down to the present. Rather, it is a power which effects transformation.

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon

In this case it may have exercised a heightening, and hence a distorting, effect on something which owes more to art than to life, more to fiction than to truth. The medieval aristocrats may not have lived up to their image; 'hardly meant' evinces at once possible misunderstanding and firm affirmation—the hard stone declares its own meaning. The 'attitude' of love has thus been created by art; art has the power, as it were, to 'make' love. But are we dealing, then, with a lie? In terms of historical truth, maybe—though we shall never know. But the desire of human beings to believe in the survival of love in itself constitutes a major truth. Hence one can justifiably speak of an 'almost-instinct' as being 'almost true.' The agnostic modern, seeking to avoid sentimentality and dubious of the existence of a destiny which shapes our ends, is not prepared to go any farther than that. Yet this almost-truth is, in Larkin's terms, a fact of the first magnitude.

Due to the carefully wrought ambiguity of this poem, neither element of the balance is allowed to dominate. It cannot be said that this has always been the case in modern interpretation of Chaucer's 'lie' in verse, the fabula of the Book of the Duchess. Some have been convinced that time, with the help of Chaucer's artistic 'grace' (whether specifically 'commissioned' or not) has transfigured Gaunt and Blanche into untruth. The possibility that John of Gaunt had committed adultery with Katherine in Blanche's lifetime has occasionally been raised, with Gaunt's wish to be buried beside his first duchess being taken as indicative of his thankfulness for her acquiescent forbearance. Then there is the question, did Gaunt do enough on Blanche's death? One may contrast, for example, Richard IPs order, on the death of his queen in 1394, that the royal manor at Sheen be destroyed; he had once enjoyed happiness with her there. (As Clerk of the Works, Chaucer had overseen alterations to that royal residence.) But, even by the standards of the age, this was an extravagant expression of grief; it can hardly be taken as a norm against which to measure Gaunt's behaviour and find it wanting.

Others have perceived an even more elaborate web of intrigue, which included Chaucer's own wife and the poet himself. For instance, it has been suggested that Gaunt may have had an affair with Philippa, the issue of which was Thomas Chaucer. Such a claim, however, rests on an extraordinarily partial interpretation of such evidence as does exist and a determination to make gaps in the historical record into significant silences. Moreover, it is quite unnecessary: such links as we know Chaucer to have had with Gaunt certainly did not require him to have been in the position of a 'contented cuckold' (as B. J. Whiting puts it) who merited some compensation, and 'in later years the fact that the duke truly loved Chaucer's sister-in-law may be reason enough why he granted financial favors' to her kin, to quote Donald Howard [in Chaucer and the Medieval World].

But let us concentrate on the relationship between Gaunt and Blanche. It has often been declared or implied that love is the most important thing that has survived of them. Sydney Armitage-Smith, in his 1904 biography of John of Gaunt, saw Blanche's death as marking the end of the best years of Gaunt's life. 'Of the sincerity of the Duke's grief there need be no question'; his 'gratitude to the memory of his first wife never failed.' Monkish attacks on Gaunt's subsequent affair with Katherine are trivialized as 'merely the venom of the cloister,' and there is special pleading with reference to the 'standard of English society in the fourteenth century,' which is supposed to have been 'not exacting' in matters of personal morality. Gaunt's conduct, Armitage-Smith believes, was 'if no better … certainly no worse' than that of others. Writing over eighty years later, Howard follows in Armitage-Smith's footsteps by seeing Gaunt's life with Blanche as marking the end of his golden age: 'Her death … wrought a change in his character. He was to be thereafter a man possessed by ambitions.' Concerning the quality of Gaunt's first love, while noting that 'Medieval knights of royal lineage are often depicted as unfeeling military leaders whose relationships with women were exploitative and wanting in sentiment,' Howard prefers to throw his own weight behind the belief that 'they could love their wives with towering and noble emotion,' and unhesitatingly takes the commemorative masses and services which Gaunt ordered, along with his declared desire to be buried beside Blanche, as firm evidence that he 'loved her deeply.' A similar dichotomy pervades Derek Brewer's approach. Evincing a robust willingness to accept medieval realpolitik and mores, he refuses to be surprised by Gaunt's prompt remarriage: 'Private sentiment could not weigh against public policy; and there was anyway a hardboiled acceptance of death in the fourteenth century.' However, these general facts of late medieval life certainly do not, in Brewer's opinion, rule out the possibility that profound 'private sentiment' could have existed in this case: 'Lancaster's genuine love for Blanche and his grief at her death are not to be questioned' [Chaucer and His World]. Chaucer's poem, he continues, is 'not so much an idealized account of life as the ideal truth to which life was so fortunate to approximate.'

George Kane, pace Chaucer's poem, is determined to portray Gaunt with warts and all, and to remind us that they were clearly visible before, as well as after, his time with Blanche. 'There was nothing [in the Book of the Duchess] about the daughter Gaunt fathered before he married Blanche'; nor could one know from it that 'Gaunt's marriage to Blanche had in fact been arranged by his father to consolidate the kingship' [Chaucer]. Yet, later, Kane declares that although this was an arranged marriage, 'It turned into a love match.' 'Lovely Blanche … never lost her place in his heart,' as is manifest by his wish to be buried beside her. However, Chaucer's latest biographer, Derek Pearsall, has challenged such reasoning. 'It was usual to be buried next to one's first wife,' he claims, 'especially when she was the foundation of one's fortune.' And the phrase 'my most dear late wife,' apparently so appropriate as applied to Blanche, is also applied to Constance of Castile (who died in 1394). Anyway, declares Pearsall, here we are dealing with 'the routine commonplaces of inky clerks' [Life of Chaucer].

How, then, can one possibly sum up Gaunt's behaviour in love? 'A spectacular man to whom the rules might not seem to apply' is Kane's verdict. Thus, Gaunt's best side is presented to the beholder: here is one who was not numbered in the roll of common men. And this is, of course, precisely what the Book of the Duchess shows and says, inasmuch as its Man in Black is an idealized figure of Gaunt. In the final analysis, we cannot claim familiarity with Gaunt. Similarly, there is considerable distance between the observer and the observed in the Book of the Duchess, the poet persona and the Gaunt-surrogate being divided by rank and experience. These matters will be discussed below. Suffice it to say here that Chaucer's portraits of Gaunt and Blanche, though idealized representations, are no effigies upon which the narrator can project his meditations—which is what is happening in the Larkin poem. For in the Book of the Duchess it is the black knight who is dominant, who imposes his meditations on a beholder, the narrator, a sub-ordinate who can listen and learn even if he cannot fully understand. He, the marvelling reporter, invites his audience to share in his admiration. And in Chaucer's poem, art, far from turning feelings into stone, serves to conserve them—but here too the pleat has stiffened, inasmuch as they are presented in forms which owe much to the ritualizing processes of literary decorums and conventions. Whether or not this is a 'lie' or an approximation to ideal truth (to echo Brewer's phrase) is impossible to tell. History allows either opinion, and gainsays neither….

Chaucer's use of the octosyllabic couplet… encourages the feeling that we are in the presence a young poet who is heavily influenced by French fashion. This was the verse-form used in the Roman de la Rose. Chaucer seems to have translated this extraordinarily influential poem into English, at least one fragment of which may have survived. It was also the measure of several of the direct sources of the Book of the Duchess, most notably Guillaume de Machaut's Remède de Fortune and Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse (c. 1360), and the Ovide moralisé, which was written between 1316 and 1328 by an anonymous Franciscan.

Some lines have one syllable more and others one syllable less. This cannot be put down to inexperience, however, since this variation is found also in the later House of Fame. Moreover, sometimes a trochee functions as the first, second, or indeed the third foot in place of the iambus. And on occasion Chaucer allows an extra syllable before the caesura and a short foot after it. All this indicates Chaucer's preference for a looser verse-form—by contrast with Gower, who in his Confessio Amantis creates octosyllabic couplets of exceptional regularity with apparent ease. The current consensus is that Chaucer cannot be judged strictly by French metrical standards, given that he seems to have been influenced by the freer English tradition of four-beat lines. Certainly there is no justification for thoroughgoing editorial attempts to 'restore' smooth octosyllabics.

Further, there is, perhaps, a general tendency to regard the octosyllabic couplet as a highly reductive measure, cramping and homogenizing in its limited scope. This should be resisted. An effective antidote is offered by the work of a contemporary master of the form, Tony Harrison. To take but two examples, his controversial poem on the Gulf War, "A Cold Coming," and his film poem "The Gaze of the Gorgon" prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that octosyllabics can accommodate both savage satire and subtle sensitivities, and are eminently capable of ranging from hope to horror, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the tender to the obscene, even within a few lines. All the more reason to give Chaucer the benefit of the doubt.

At two points in the Book of the Duchess a more complicated rhyme scheme is used. This is in the case of the 'enclosed lyrics,' the Man in Black's initial 'compleynte' about his lost 'lady bryght' and the very first 'song' which, according to his reminiscences, he wrote in expression of his feelings for her. The latter rhymes aabbaa. The former has a more elaborate scheme, aabbaccdccd, which seems to be imperfect. All the manuscripts agree here, but normally one would expect a second couplet rhyming on a, though as a genre the complaint can take many forms. In William Thynne's 1532 edition of Chaucer the line 'Now have I tolde the, sothe to say' appears after the indubitably authentic line 1180, but Thynne may simply have made it up.

By including lyrics in this way and highlighting them as discrete units within the narrative (we are told when a recital is about to begin, and some comment is made to mark its completion), Chaucer was following in the footsteps of the Old French poets. The fiction of overhearing and recording a superior's lyric was almost certainly indebted to Machaut's Fonteinne Amoureuse, in which the patron's accomplished complaint is transcribed admiringly by the narrator. But the 'intercalated lyric' is a common feature of the dit amoreux genre. To take one of the most influential dits of them all as an example, in Machaut's Remède de Fortune the narrator composes a lay about his feelings for his lady and a complaint about Fortune. (At the end of the latter Machaut presents the I-persona as debating and struggling alone ('per moy debatus'). That particular phrase calls to mind Chaucer's statement that the Man in Black's complaint is 'to hymselve,' and later, in Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus will be described as 'disputyng with hymself' in the 'matere' of fate and fortune.) Subsequently Hope sings a chant royal and a baladele to comfort and cheer the lover. Duly revitalized, he composes a ballade to his lady, and prays to Love. The climax comes when he actually performs a chanson baladee before her, after which she consents to be called his beloved; overjoyed, he sings a rondelet as he takes his leave. It could be said that here poetic production is being put in place of amatory experience, an effect which is even more obvious in Machaut's Voir Dit (c. 1364), wherein the lover-narrator and the beloved, Toute-Belle, exchange poems and verse letters, and when their relationship blossoms, each writes a lyric by way of celebration. Jean Froissart's Prison Amoureuse (c. 1360), which is fundamentally a sequence of lyrics and letters, is an obvious attempt to surpass the Voir Dit; similarly, Froissart's Paradys d'Amours (c. 1362-9) includes examples of the rondel, rondelet, lay, virelay, and ballade, which the characters sing with pleasure and much self-congratulation. Nominally these lyric performances record and reflect the psychological history of the narrator and/or some authority figure, but above all else they are an ostentatious display of technical virtuosity, the narrative functioning as a show-case.

Chaucer is rather more interested in having the intercalated lyric fulfil a definite narrative function. Thus, it is the Man in Black's complaint that first tells us that his beloved is dead; thereby the scene is set for the lengthy conversation which follows. And the composition of his very first song in honour of the lady White is also presented as an event of real significance in the furtherance of the story. Knowledge of the bereaved lover's past emotions helps us to understand his present ones. The fact that there are only two lyrics, rather than a formidable arsenal, makes them all the more effective in these terms; they function symmetrically as a neatly contrasting pair. The point which I want to emphasize, however, is that these lyrics keep the action moving rather than hold it up; to some extent this is due, of course, to the fact that they are a lot shorter than most of the effusions in the French dits, but different literary priorities are the major determining factor. When John Lydgate came to produce his own version of Chaucer's poem, the Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe (written during the period 1398-1412), he returned to the French manner of doing things which we have just described, the result being a poem which comprises a sequence of quite static set pieces. The actual complaint of 'a man / In black and white, colour pale and wan' occupies some 356 lines within a poem of 681 lines, thus constituting over half its total length. Lydgate's eavesdropping narrator does not actually converse with the grieving knight, but carefully records what he said—to entertain the audience!

A pene I toke and gan me fast[e] spede
The woful pleynt[e] of this man to write,
Worde by worde as he dyd endyte:
Lyke as I herde and coud him tho reporte
I haue here set, youre hertis to dysporte.

And he utters a twenty-five-line prayer to 'lady Venus' on the knight's behalf. The poem ends with two envoys, of eight lines each, the first to 'Princes' and 'womanhede' in general and the second to his 'luyves quene' in particular. Here direct human contact is avoided, Lydgate being more interested in the aureate encrustation of disembodied emotions than the creation of selfhoods or with their interaction. The contrasts with the Book of the Duchess are striking.

Chaucer's interest in the intercalated lyric was by no means confined to the Book of the Duchess. Anelida and Arcite contains an elaborate 'compleynt,' and a 'roundel' in praise of St Valentine's Day appears near the end of the Parliament of Fowls. In the F Prologue to the Legend of Good Women a 'balade' beginning 'Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere' is recited ('seyn') by the I-persona, while in the G Prologue it is sung by the group of ladies which accompanies the God of Love; these performances have an ornamental function in the main. Moreover, in Troilus and Criseyde there is a Canticus Troili at i. 400-20 (on the contrary emotions characteristic of love) and another at v. 638-44 (on the torment caused by Criseyde's absence). In the second book Antigone sings 'cleere' a 'Troian song,' which encourages Criseyde to sympathetic to Troilus, while the final book includes two verse letters, one from Troilus to Criseyde, the other, Criseyde's reply. More unusually, in the third book Boethian philosophy is recast in the form of yet another Canticus Troili, sung by the overjoyed prince in celebration of the consummation of his love. As Ardis Butterfield has argued so well, this may be regarded as a development of the French practice of lyric enclosure, less surprising given the manifest debt of some of the dits amoreux, particularly the Remede de Fortune, to theConsolatio philosophiae. Clearly, Old French verse-forms and intercalating techniques exercised an influence on Chaucer which lasted well into his so-called Italian period.

Moving on now to discuss the poem's style, with special reference to its rhetoric, it may be said that Chaucer took a calculated risk in introducing idiomatic dialogue, which is generally awkward to handle in verse. Lines 1042 ff. work very well, the tricky exchange at 1045-7 being handled with especial skill. Then again, a wonderfully comic effect is achieved at lines 184-6, when Juno's messenger wakes up Morpheus ('Who clepeth ther?' / 'Hyt am I'). But lines 1309-10 pose problems even for some of the poem's greatest admirers.

'She ys ded!' 'Nay!' 'Yis, be my trouthe!'
'Is that youre los? Be God, hyt ys routhe!'

For a climax to a long apotheosis of love and the lady, is not this rather disappointing? Of course, it could be said that here at last the poem's displacing and ritualizing decorums have been left behind, as the plain fact of death is confronted in plain speech. But there is a hint of something else, something which feels uncomfortably like bathos. The chime of the rhyme diminishes the emotional force of the exchange, making it sound inappropriately pat and curt. A similar effect occurs at the end of the 'poem within the poem', the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, when the traumatized queen is dismissed rather brusquely:

… 'Alas!' quod she for sorwe,
And deyede within the thridde morwe.

Here, however, the effect can be justified as part and parcel of the 'game' which the narrator may be playing with the ancient text. Alternatively, Chaucer could have been striving to construct a blunt statement of the facts of death, a theory which can claim support from the emphasis on earthly transience that is characteristic of the entire passage which culminates with this couplet.

The prevailing impression given by the poem, however, is of an enthusiastic and highly ambitious writer who is in love with rhetoric. This may be illustrated with reference to Chaucer's long descriptio of 'faire White', which occupies lines 817-1041, with a brief continuation at lines 1052-87, making a grand total of some 261 lines of verse. Chaucer took the account of a beautiful lady (who, incidentally, proves unfaithful) as seen through the eyes of her lover from Machaut's Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne (composed before 1342), and embellished it further, developing its theme with devices of amplificatio (amplification, enlargement) and enriching its language with the ornaments of style. Both descriptions follow a set pattern, as recommended by the medieval arts of poetry and followed with extraordinary consistency by generations of medieval poets writing in the several European vernaculars as well as in Latin. Medieval gentlemen certainly preferred blondes, and ladies with golden hair, thin brown eyebrows, slender waists, swelling bellies (suggesting child-bearing potential), and of lily and rose complexion are ubiquitous in literature and painting.

The rhetoricians had listed the personal attributes which should be included in a description, including name, nature, style of life, fortune, quality, diligence, and the like. Chaucer is particularly interested in the lady's name, whereas in the Behaingne Machaut was not:

And goode faire White she het;
That was my lady name ryght.
She was bothe fair and bryght;
She hadde not hir name wrong.

By the interpretation of a person's name something good or bad about them may be intimated, declares Matthew of Vendôme in his Ars versiflcatoria (written before 1175). For example, Maximus lives up to his great name in nobility and soul (Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto), whereas Caesar 'takes his name from his achievement' (a reference to one of Matthew's own examples of descriptio). Similarly, 'faire White' is white by name and white and bright by nature. Moreover, she is determined to live up to her good name: 'She loved so wel hir owne name.' The artes poetriae advocate an emphasis on a person's rank, and that certainly is being placed here: the lady White knows who she is, and the poem makes sure that we know it too. Her beauty functions to confirm her high birth and impeccable breeding.

Chaucer takes Machaut's statement that the lady's hair 'was like strands of gold, neither too blond nor too brown,' and builds it up into a circumlocutio or roundabout statement, which ends with an affirmation of his conclusion:

For every heer on hir hed,
Soth to seyne, hyt was not red,
Ne nouther yelowe ne broun hyt nas;
Me thoughte most lyk gold hyt was.

In his Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi Geoffrey of Vinsauf—the 'Gaufred, deere maister soverayn' referred to in the "Nun's Priest's Tale"—says of this device, 'instead of speaking of a thing directly, we move about [it] in a circle.' And certainly that is what is happening here.

Exclamatio, exclamation which expresses vehemently some emotion, occurs at lines 895-7 and 919-20 (cf. 1075, etc.). Chaucer employs repetitio, repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several lines, at 827-9 (Of … '), 869-70 ('Hyt …'), 906-7 and 911-12 ('And …'), 927-8 ('Ne … '), 988-9 ('And … '), 1025-6 (To … '), 1038-40, ('My/Myn …'), etc. Then there is interrogatio, where a question is asked for rhetorical effect and not as a request for information. The comparison of White to the phoenix in order to emphasize her uniqueness is of course an exemplum (cf. 1052-87, where a formidable arsenal of exempla may be found, White being likened to Penelope and Lucrece). The older poet was to exploit the funny side of the ponderous use of exempla in Troilus and Criseyde. There Troilus, having been warned against excessive weeping like Niobe (who turned into stone when grieving), tells Pandarus that he has had enough:

'What knowe I of the queene Nyobe?
Lat be thyne olde ensaumples, I the preye'.

But that is some time away in the future, and of course the context is very different. To be sure, the Man in Black is hardly impressed with the role model of Socrates as recommended by the dreamer, but he is too polite to protest much, even when his companion provides him with five further exempla for good measure. Later, he himself demonstrates a fatal attraction to the device.

There are, however, aspects of Machaut's account in the Behaingne which Chaucer abbreviates rather than amplifies. The descriptions of the lady's 'forehead, eyebrows, nose, mouth, teeth, chin, haunches, thighs, legs, feet, flesh' and the statement of her age are all omitted, as Derek Brewer succinctly puts it. This was probably due to decorum: Chaucer could not be too familiar in textualizing the wife of the powerful Gaunt, a woman who had been one of the most eminent heiresses throughout England. Indeed, some of the specimen descriptions provided in the artes poetriae include rather salacious passages, as when Matthew of Vendôme, having described a woman's ivory teeth, milky forehead, snowy neck, star-like eyes, rosy lips, narrow waist, and 'luscious little belly,' moves on to consider her 'sweet home of Venus': 'The sweetness of savour that lies hid in the realm of Venus / The judging touch can fortell.' This voyeurism (fairly standard in Matthew) sees the female body very much in terms of its sexual attractions to the male. Machaut's lover was more circumspect: Of the rest, which I did not see, I can assure you … that it was in perfect accord with Nature, pleasing in shape and contour. This remaining part, which I wish to speak no more of here, must be held without comparison to be sweeter and more beautiful than any other.' Chaucer took discretion even further—

—even though he is putting these words in the mouth of the man who, within the narrative, subsequently wins her. The Man in Black is, of course, speaking of White as she was when he first knew her, rather than from the point of view of a husband married to her for nine years (the length of time that Gaunt was married to Blanche).

Not that Chaucer is averse to elaborating on the traditional physical attributes: he moves away from Machaut in adding plumpness to the arms and red fingernails to the customarily white hands and in noting her straight flat back and long body. Moreover, he describes her speech, as goodly, friendly, soft, and reasonable; here he was following another poem of Machaut's, the Remede de Fortune. Matthew of Vendôme recommends the inclusion of this attribute, for someone's character can be established through reference to a 'cultivated manner of speaking', as when Ovid says that grace was not absent in the 'eloquent speech' of Ulysses (Metamorphoses). Of course, some aspects of Machaut's description simply did not apply to Blanche, as, for example, her age. The Machaut lady, the subject of so much male praise and the cause of so much sorrow on account of her infidelity, is fourteen and a half years old. Heroines in medieval literature can be, by today's standards, surprisingly young, probably a reflection of the medieval belief that women matured and died earlier than men. For instance, Emilia in Boccaccio's Teseida (the primary source of the "Knight's Tale") is only 15 when she marries Palemone. By contrast, Chaucer makes no comment about how old his Emelye was, and professes ignorance of the age of Criseyde (Troilus and Criseyde). He also avoids mentioning White's age. Blanche was 27 when she died, and thus past her prime (as envisioned in Chaucer's day), and so it may have been delicacy which prompted him to avoid that matter. Against this, it may be noted that Froissart described her as having died 'fair and young'—but then, he was vague about her age, remarking that she was 'about twenty-two years old,' which is a considerable underestimate. Returning to Blanche as textualized by Chaucer, there is another possible reason for his silence. She was slightly (at the most one year) younger than Gaunt, and so the specification of her age might have made her greater maturity seem implausible, even allowing for the belief that women were thought to mature earlier. But of course, it would be quite naïve to talk as if White is Blanche or the Man in Black is Gaunt, for we are dealing with fictions which maintain some distance from their real-life equivalents, in a manner which owes much to the practice of the dits amoreux.

Moreover, certain aspects of White which Chaucer wished to describe simply had no precedent in the Behaingne. Her moral qualities are emphasized, qualities markedly absent in the case of the lady in Machaut's poem, who left her adoring knight for another man. Once again, Chaucer follows the precepts and the practice of the rhetoricians. Matthew of Vendôme includes in his series of model descriptiones an account of the virtuous woman, here identified as Marcia, wife of Cato. This paragon is said to reject 'feminine deceits,' display understanding, and radiate trustworthiness. 'The honesty of her speech portends / The value of her virtue'; she 'lacks guile,' the 'goodwill of her gaze' not being 'a craving for Venus' sport … Marcia is strong in mind.' Similarly, White is friendly but not forward; no prude (she enjoys dancing and modest 'pleye') but certainly no flirt. Her glance is direct, quite lacking in coquettishness and sexual allure, as is her behaviour in general. Her intelligence is disposed to all goodness, and she is incapable of wronging anyone. In her dealings with men she is honest and straightforward, giving no encouragement where none is meant and not being the type to set a suitor elaborate tests of love, sending him off to foreign lands to win 'worshyp' before he can enter her presence again. However, she is not to be won easily; the black knight has to 'serve' her for a year before she takes him into her 'governance,' thereby making a man of this rather callow youth. Marcia, Matthew of Vendôme concludes, is a fit wife for the wise Cato. White, Chaucer's poem implies, was the perfect match for the Man in Black.

Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his Poetria nova (composed between 1200 and 1213), recommends that descriptio be delightful as well as large, 'handsome as well as big.' In order that the mind should be 'fully refreshed,' he continues, 'her conventional nature should not be too trite'; 'more unusual usages' should therefore be sought. In similar vein, Matthew of Vendôme declares that a writer is at fault when he employs 'a superfluous flourish of words and ornamented speech and grasps at clouds and vacuities.' In the Book of the Duchess Chaucer's verse sometimes comes perilously close to doing just that. It must be said, of course, that medieval vernacular poetry is generally designed for oral performance, or at least circumscribed by strategies which had developed to enhance oral delivery. Here is literature composed above all else to be heard, when read aloud to a company or indeed to oneself (whether the words were declaimed or mouthed), 'silent reading' being a rarity. Hence the rhetorical nature of so much medieval literature. We are dealing with 'performance texts' par excellence, works which require room to create their effects, long periods to build up their descriptions, since the writer cannot rely on his public reading and rereading a passage until all its significance is grasped (this being the usual means in which poetry is experienced in an age of print rather than script).

After all due allowance is made for these factors, however, it may be said that Chaucer has not as yet learned that big may not be beautiful and that more can mean less. On the other hand, certain passages in the Book of the Duchess have an exquisite charm which is scarcely rivalled by anything he was to write later: the lightsome dream-chamber, the lush landscape through which the mysterious dog leads the dreamer, White dancing 'so comlily' and laughing with her friends, the black knight's description of how he and she lived as one, and so forth. And as a whole the poem has retained its power to move.

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The Book of the Duchess: Chaucer and the Medieval Physicians