Abstract
Beginning with a broken metamorphosis, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess attempts to resolve the scandal of gender’s visuality through its relational construction of a memorial poetics. In the Ovidian story, metamorphosis saves Alcyone from suicide; this transformation revives her and reifies her husband, changing both into sea birds.1 Chaucer’s rendition sees Alcyone dead within three days of the return of her husband’s body. Mortality, along with its ultimate proof, death, is more visible in Chaucer’s poem than in his sources.2 Chaucer’s treatment of the Ceyx and Alcyone narrative thus reveals a suspicion of superficial visions that is relevant to the larger composition to which it belongs. This account, like the Black and White story it presages, is a tangible arrangement of differences that are narrative, visual, and topographic.3 Because gender difference is staked on degrees of visual distance in the Book of the Duchess, this chapter addresses the spatial arrangement of perspective across its aesthetic, religious, scientific, and philosophical contexts. The process of spatial arrangement is more relational than linear in the poem itself, so the argument of this chapter will follow the poem’s meandering path in order to address the artistic, religious, and intellectual controversies that Chaucer finesses through his creation of a powerful feminine image.
Take one fresh and tender kiss
Add one stolen night of bliss
One girl, one boy, some grief, some joy
—Johnny Cash, Memories Are Made of This
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Notes
V Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books IX–XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller, ed. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 43 (1916; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) XL 410–749.
James Wimsatt, “The Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Seys and Alcyone,’” Medium Aevum 36 (1967): 231–41, suggests that Chaucer probably used Ovid, along with Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoreuse, and the Ovide moralisé.
See A. J. Minnis, with V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 90–112, for a survey and discussion of Chaucer’s sources.
See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966), pp. 50–81, who argues that medieval thinkers turned rules of place and image in the rhetorical construction of memory to devotional purposes.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 34–45, explores locational memory using two principal metaphors, that of the book, or tablet, and that of the house, or “cella.” Both writers stress that memory, as a constitutive element of rhetoric (particularly in the Rlietorica ad Herrenium), is a practice that gains its kinship with art through the application of regularized discipline.
It is important to distinguish, then, between dreams, which were the province of the imagination, and dream visions, which were the territory of the memory. As Carruthers explains in her Book of Memory, pp. 58–59, Aristotle suggests that dream images are spontaneous combinations of the imagination. For an image to reach the vis memorativa, by contrast, it would have to become part of what we would call “long-term memory.” As she discusses in her Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 171–220, dream visions are a recollective representation of compositional invention. Works including A. C. Spearing’s, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)
Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)
Kathryn L. Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) suggest that medieval dream vision was almost purely a literary form.
Steven Kruger’s Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), shows that even as dreams were considered to be physiological in some respects, in others they were thought of as expressive, either in purely aesthetic or in divinely prophetic terms.
Kruger’s work, as well as J. Stephen Russell’s The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1988), indicates that the view of dreams in the Middle Ages crossed discourses of theology, art, and science.
Although Yates and Carruthers show in rich and ample ways the rhetorical and creative processes of memory, I would credit Michael Camille, particularly his essay, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Medieval Practices of Seeing,” Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 197–223, for thinking about the connections between aesthetics and physiology in medieval conceptions of perception and epistemology.
See Katherine Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics, 1230–1345 (New York: Brill, 1988)
David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 141–46.
As W. R. Jones, “Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 27–50, suggests, the debate over religious images turned on contrasting definitions of idolatria: “The English iconodules defined idolatria in a narrow, historical sense, applicable to pagans and infidels, who worshipped the wrong things, and sometimes to sorcerers, who used images for magical purposes” (p. 43). Reformers, by contrast, applied idolatria to a broad range of image-usage, only excepting reverence for signs that were themselves stripped of ornament (e.g., a “poor cross”). While this debate is only in the nascent stage when Chaucer is supposed to have composed this poem, the challenges to sight that contribute to anxieties regarding images are already circulating.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 11–23.
I am also indebted to D. Vance Smith, “Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 161–84; “Plague, Panic Space, and the Tragic Medieval Household,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 367–413; and Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), who connects memory to the rhythms of the everyday and the locus of the medieval household. This “domestication” of memory is important to my thinking about gender, because it suggests ways in which repetitions, arrangements, and elisions that characterize memory work also typify the reiterative processes of coverage that give categories of masculinity and femininity their naturalized cultural appearance.
For an analysis of medieval diagrams that divided the brain into chambers, see Edwin Clark and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 10–24.
Avicenna’s influence is elucidated in John E. Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), pp. 325–26
finally A. Mark Smith’s essay, “Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics,” his 72 (1981): 572 [568–89], has a succinct and sophisticated diagram of the interworkings of medieval faculties, which culminate in the recollective gathering of memory.
The classic accounts of medieval faculty psychology remain Murray Wright Bundy’s The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1927), pp. 177–224
Ruth E. Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975).
H.A. Mark Smith, “Getting the Big Picture,” pp. 572–73, discusses the interrelation of Galen and Aristotle in medieval theory; this classification-scheme is from Carolyn Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in the “Canterbury Tales” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 6.
Hugh of St. Victor, “Hugo of St. Victor: ‘De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum,’ “ ed. William M. Green, Speculum 18 (1943): 484–93. (p. 490, lines 26–27): [ut eas quoque quae extrinsecus accidere possunt circumstantias rerum non neglegentur attendamus].
Albertus Magnus, Commentary on Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 127.
See Charles Muscatine, who, in Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 107, claims that Chaucer’s use of comic versions of Ovidian narrative (e.g., Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse) “brings into the most serious part of the poem a tasteless vein of humor.”
Derek Pearsall, “The Roving Eye: Point of View in the Medieval Perception of Landscape,” Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve, ed. R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001), p. 469 [463–77] rightly points out that medieval art allows for a free gaze over a visual scene, since pictures often rely on their viewers “to read, scan, store, and recompose.”
But he does not take into account the discipline of cognitive composition in his consideration of the eye’s mobility: “the eye moves about the picture, not under any constraining discipline of order, and chooses its moments of truth.” Mnemonic practice, which regulates the process of image making, means that the “wandering around” that Pearsall identifies as part of the experience of medieval art is meant to assume its own orderly composition. This measured, stationed seeing is thus more akin to what Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): p. 11 [6–18], describes as “the determining male gaze [which] projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.”
In her influential and provocative analysis of loss in elegiac poetics, Louise O. Fradenburg, “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria 2 (1990): 169–202, argues that Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, like other works of death, uses a system of threat and reward to obscure loss, thereby providing through narrative “inconclusiveness” a defense against its persistence. For, as she points out, the birth of poetry and the promise of prosperity await Chaucer’s masculine dyad in a relation of reward that staves off the threat of isolation accompanying protracted mourning.
See Carruthers, Craft of Thought, pp. 176–79, for a discussion of the exedra, a chamber designed for compositional memory work. As she points out, these chambers were often decorated with familiar images that were designed to spur mental invention. Interestingly, Michael Norman Salda, “Pages from History: The Medieval Palace of Westminster as a Source for the Dreamer’s Chamber in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 111–25, argues that this dreamscape is not based on a “literary” scene (such as a particular illuminated manuscript), but is a rendering of St. Stephen’s chapel.
Petrarch, perhaps in a bid for inventional ingenuity, complains about those who “decorate their rooms with furniture devised to decorate their minds and…use books as they use Corinthian vases or painted panels and statues,” Petrarch: Four Dialogues for Scholars…from “De remedies utriusque fortune,” ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Cleveland, OH: Press of Western Reserve University, 1967), p. 31.
Kathryn L. Lynch, “The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision: The Argument of Form,” Genre 21 (1988): 279–306; She elaborates this argument in her book, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions.
For a helpful discussion, see Michael Camille, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 16–23.
See Alastair Minnis, “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 240–42, for a discussion of Aquinas’s differences from the opinions of his teacher, Albertus Magnus.
Alastair Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif and Late-Medieval Theories of Imagination,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 71–103.
See William J. Courtenay, Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), pp. 208–9, who explains that symbols for Aquinas “declared…an action or effect.”
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. Colman E. O’Neill O. P., vol. 50 (London: Blackfriars, 1965), 3a. 25, a. 3, which demonstrates Courtenay’s suggestion in relation to the reverence due to images of Christ: “Applying this to our problem, we conclude that no reverence is shown to the image of Christ insofar as it is an independent reality—a piece of wood, carved or painted— for reverence cannot be given to any but a rational being. It remains that whatever reverence is shown it has in view its function as an image. From this it follows that the same reverence is shown to the image of Christ as to Christ himself. Since, therefore, Christ is paid divine worship, so too his image should be paid divine worship” [Sic ergo dicendum est quod imagini Christi, inquantum est res quaedam, puta lignum sculptum vel pictum, nulla reverentiaexhibetur: quia reverentianonnisi rationali naturae debetur. Relinquitur ergo quod exhibeatur ei reverentiaexhibeatur imagini Christi et ipsi Christo. Cum ergo Christus adoretur adoratione latriae, consequens est quod ejus imago sit adoratione latriae adoranda].
Sarah Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England: Gaze, Body, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” New Literary History, 28 (1997): p. 279 [261–89].
See the classic study by Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957).
Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Susannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) resist in different ways Panofsky’s clean periodization of affective directness.
Rachel Fulton’s From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), is also useful for thinking specifically about devotion to Christie and Marian images in medieval devotional practice.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 191.
Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 131–34
Sara Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 23
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 96–102.
Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 243–71; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 109–117; and Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval Town,” Past and Present, 98 (1983): 3–29.
See Susan Crane’s The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chapter 1 and chapter 4
Louise O. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
Middle English Lyrics, ed. Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (New York: Norton, 1974), #215, (p. 208).
See PhiUipa Hardman, “Chaucer’s Man of Sorrows: Secular Images of Pity in the Book of the Duchess, the Squire’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): p. 206 [204–27], who shows that fourteenth-century lyrics depicting Christ’s suffering ask the reader “to ‘behold,’ ‘look,’ ‘see’ the sorrows and pains of Christ,” which she connects to the growing popularity of the Man of Sorrows in continental, then English art. Such cues to pity, Hardman argues, p. 219, are a “challenge: an opportunity to assess one’s own emotional health, to discover by confronting the archetype of sorrow whether one has a pitiful human heart, or an unmoved and ‘fendly’ one.”
Sara Lipton, “The Sweet Lean of His Head”: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–208.
Also see Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), pp. 100–108, who discusses what he calls the “topography of visionary experience.”
V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: the First Five “Canterbury Tales” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 30.
As Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 184–85, explains of the imago pietatis, “Christ is shown oppressed by suffering, although the Crucifixion is past, as the wounds in hands, feet, and side bear witness…The intention is entirely meditative, to confront the beholder with a timelessly suffering Christ and thus to arouse his compassion.”
R. A. Shoafi, “Stalking the Sorrowful H(e)art: Penitential Lore and the Hunt Scene in Chaucer’s ‘The Book of the Duchess,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 313–24.
Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: the Medieval uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially chapter 1.
Mary Carruthers, “‘The Mystery of the Bed Chamber’: Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess,” The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony, ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), p. 79 [67–87], makes the connection between confession and elegy explicit: “The elegiac poem is like a confession only because both activities are dependent on memory-work. Each involves a sustained, deliberate act of remembering, though their goals are different. Both also begin in grief, mourning (for one’s self, for another) as the matrix of remembering.”
See Guillaume de Machaut, Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne and Remede de fortune, ed. James I. Wimsatt, William W. Kibler, and Rebecca A. Baltzer, The Chaucer Libarary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 112–15 (ll. 1050–107); and pp. 218–23 (ll. 905–1000).
See George Lyman Kittredge, “Guillaume De Machaut and the Book of the Duchess,” PMLA 30 (1915): 1–24, who argues that the image of Fortune is influenced by the Remede de fortune, Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne, the eighth Motet, and Comfort.
Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, ed. A. W. Pollard (London: A. Constable & co., 1903), p. 137.
H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 423.
Peter W. Travis, “White,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 1–66. I am highly indebted to Travis’s exhaustive inquiry into the ways that “White” precipitates misrecognition in relation to medieval debates concerning meaning and reference in language. My interest in his thinking about this meconaissance is the potentially deliberate character of Black’s misrecognition. As we see with the fers confusion, misrecognition can be applied to preserve categorical stability in one instance by sacrificing clarity in the case of another seemingly stable distinction.
See Jenny Adams, “Pawn Takes Knight’s Queen: Playing with Chess in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 125–38, who insightfully connects the high stakes of Black’s game to the widespread practice of gambling on chess.
See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 429–50, who posits the “logic of the supplement” as a continual threat to invention, insofar as the creator’s place is continually subject to displacement.
Matthew de Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria, Les Arts poétiques du XII et XIII siècles, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: E. Champion, 1924), pp. 121–31. Matthew has seven models of description, each of which moves from describing exterior features to interior worth.
Ockham’s objection to species can be considered antirepresentational. See A. Stephen McGrade, “Seeing Things: Ockham and Representationalism,” L’Homme et son Univers au Moyen Age, Philosophes Médiéaux 27 (Louvain-la-Neuve: 1986): 591–97. Ockham claims that habits are synonymous with species in Aristotle, and further argues that they are a locational way of preserving things past: II Rep. Q. 14, Opera philosophica et theologica, 5, p. 261, lines 13–18: “Cognitio autem intuitiva imperfecta est ilia per quam iudicamus rem aliquando fuisse vel non fuisse. Et haec dicitur cognitio recordativa; ut quando video aliquam rem intuitva, generator habitus incli-nans ad cognitionem abstractivam, mediante qua iudico et assentio quod talis res aliquando fuit quia aliquando vidi earn.”
Heather Phillips, “John Wyclif and the Optics of the Eucharist,” From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, Studies in Church History 5 (London: Blackwell, 1987), p. 247, n. 12 [245–58], provides the relevant passages of comparison between the two writers.
For example, see De Eucharistia, ed. J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, Wyclif Society (London: Trübner, 1892), pp. 11–13.
John Wyclif, Tractatus de Mandatis Divinis, ed. J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, Wyclif Society (London: C.K. Paul, 1922), pp. 152–58. Wyclif claimed that the exposure to images could have good or ill effects: in their “proper” usage, the exposure to images kindled the faith of the mind, encouraging devout worship of God. By contrast, in negative instances, an image could lead one astray from true faith, which would entail adoration of an image with latria (the adoration due to God alone). His distinction between the proper and improper use of images is summed up in his statement, p. 156, “Et patet quod ymagines tarn bene quam male possunt fieri: bene ad excitandum, facilitandum et accendendum mentes fidelium, ut colant devocius Deum suum; et male ut occasione ymaginum a veritate fidei aberretur, ut ymago ilia vel latria vel dulia adoretur…”
G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 131, identified a group of writings that constituted a non-heretical critique of images.
See also G. R. Owst, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961), pp. 135–50.
Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), p. 153 n. 65, suggests that these writings might be called “Wycliffite” Lollardy, since Wyclif preserved Gregory the Great’s claim that images were books for the unlearned even as he criticized the improper use of images as idolatry.
Wyclif was not alone, nor was he unorthodox, in cautioning against the deceptive power of images. Citing Grosseteste, Wyclif claims in Tractatus De Mandatis Divinis, p. 64, that “the variety of apparel, buildings, utensils, and other objects invented by pride constitutes the book or graven image of the devil, by which mammon or another is worshipped in the image. Therefore the whole church, or a great part of it, is tainted by this idolatry, because the works of their hands are effectively more highly valued than God.” His comments are similar to those of Richard Fitzralph, (Owst, Literature and the Pulpit, p. 141) who claims that “those who venerate such images for their own sake and make offerings to them to procure healing or benefits of some kind appear to be true and potent idolaters.” And, as Nicholas Watson illustrates in his “‘Et que est huius ydoli materia? Tuipse’: Idols and Images in Walter Hilton,” Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 95–111, before Hilton penned his defense of images in his De adoracione ymaginum, he had used iconoclastic rhetoric to represent the sinful soul in several works, both Latin and vernacular.
On the Twenty-Five Articles, Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. Thomas Arnold, vol. 3 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 463.
John Wyclif, Sermones, vol. 2, ed. J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, Wyclif Society (London: Trübner, 1888), p. 165.
As the charge against and answer of an accused heretic from the turn of the fifteenth century indicates, the legitimacy of image-making depended on the affective effect of an image’s figuration in the century after Chaucer’s death. While the “Sixteen Points on which the Bishops Accuse Lollards,” English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 19, claims “pat neiper crosse ne ymages peynted or grauen in pe worship of God or any oper seyntis in pe chirche shuld be worschipid,” the accused replied, p. 23, that “be making of ymages trewly peynted is leueful, and men mowen leuefuliche worschippe hem in sum manere, as signes or tokones.”
Ardis Butterfield, “Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess,” Medium Aevum 60 (1991): p. 50 [33–60].
Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Perry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 31, makes it clear that love is an interactive ideal: “Love gets its name (amor) from the word for hook (amus), which means ‘to capture’ or ‘to be captured,’ for he who is in love is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture someone else with his hook…so the man who is a captive of love tries to attract another person by his allurements and exerts all his efforts to unite two different hearts with an intangible bond…”
See Robin Hass, “‘A Picture of Such Beauty in their Minds’: The Medieval Rhetoricians, Chaucer, and Evocative Effictio,” Exemplaria 14 (2002): 383–422.
Also see Valerie Allen, “Portrait of a Lady: Blaunche and the Descriptive Tradition,” English Studies 74 (1993): 324–42, who argues that Chaucer attempts to render a more complex method of description for Blanche by admitting a relation between mind and body.
Andrew Cowell, “The Dye of Desire: The Colors of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria 11 (1999): pp. 116–18 [115–39]. As Carruthers and Ziolkowski point out, many medieval writers connect rhetoric’s colors with perception, insofar as sight was described as its vehicle, with the other senses serving as its “colors.”
Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, IV, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 102.
The connection between coloring in language and art was sometimes made explicit by those who objected to images in devotional practice, as we see in the Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich 1428–31, ed. N. P. Tanner, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 20 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 44, “lewd wrights of stokes hawe and fourme suche crosses and ymages, and after that lewd peyntors glorye thaym with colours…”
John Wyclif, Sermons, Select English Works of John Wyclif ed. T. Arnold, vol. 2 (1871), p. 15
Treatise of Miracle Plays, Reliquiae antiquae, ed. T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, vol. 2 (London: J.R. Smith, 1845), pp. 42–57.
Geoffrey de Vinsauf, The Poetria Nova, The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine, ed. and trans. Ernest A. Gallo (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), pp. 583–89: […metumque polito / Marmore plus poliat Natura potentior arte. / Succuba sit capitis pretiosa colore columna / Lactea, quae speculum vultus supportet in altum / Ex cristallino procedat gutture quidam / Splendor, qui possit oculos referire videntis / Et cor furari…].
Diane M. Ross, “The Play of Genres in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 1–13, identifies the three modes of expression the knight uses to identify White: lyric, allegory, and proces, or sequential narrative. Although she sees each of these modes ending in failure, I would argue, with many other critics, that this layered structure is an attempt to arrange the knight’s identity in a fashion that covers over such failures with at least the image of consolation.
In William Caxton’s translation of the Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y. Offord, EETS Supplementary Series 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1971), p. 150, 11. 10–14: Cxij, “Example of many goodladyes of tyme presente,” the Knight tells of many women who should be made models for emulation. Of the woman married to a “symple” man, the knight claims: “And therfore she ought to be preysed in all estates / and to be sette amonge the good ladyes / how be it that she was no grete mystresse / but the goodnes and bounte of her may be to al other a myrrour and exemplary / wherfore men ought not to hyde the fayttes and good dedes of ony woman.”
Robert Grosseteste, Carmina Anglo-Normannica: Robert Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’Amour, to which are added, “La Vie de Sainte Marie Egyptienne” and an English version of the Chasteau d’Amour, ed. M. Cooke (1852; New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), ll. 392–93.
Russell A. Peck, “Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,” Speculum 53 (1978): 745–60.
This kind of declaration, since it is an attempt to remember the absent beloved, finds particular resonance with Reginald Pecock’s defense of images in his treatise, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1860), vol. 1, p. 268, when he argues that the affection produced by a (devotional) image is similar to the remembrance of an absent friend: “Wherefore the other next present being of his freend, which is next aftir his bodily present visible being, is the next grettist meene aftir his bodily visible presence into the gendering of the seid affeccioun.” Even more striking, Pecock uses the image of bodily embrace for a loved one to suggest the ways in which images of Christ move viewers to devotion, p. 271, “(euen ri3t as we han experience that oon persoon gendrith more loue to an other, if he biclippe him in armys, than he shulde, if he not come so ny3 to him and not biclip-pid him,)—it muste nedis folewe, if thou ymagine Crist or an other Seint for to be bodili strei3t thoru3out the bodi of the ymage, that thou shalt gendre, gete, and haue bi so miche the more good affeccioun to God or to the Seint, that thou dost to him touching him in the ymage as bi ymaginacioun.”
Denis Walker, “Narrative Inconclusiveness and Consolatory Dialectic in the Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 15 [1–17].
See Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 207–71, who uses this term to refer to the misplaced metaphysical desire to strip language of its figurative coloration.
Phillipa Hardman, “The Book of the Duchess as a Memorial Monument,” Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 209 [208–13].
See Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), pp. 75–78; pp. 138–41.
For discussions of John of Gaunt’s marriage to Blanche as it relates to Chaucer’s poem, see Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Tife, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987)
George Kane, Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). It should be noted that biographers of both Gaunt and Chaucer generally conclude that Gaunt’s affection was sincere. My point is a simpler one, and relates to the ways in which Chaucer’s poem makes such sounding of sincerity impossible. As Minnis, Shorter Poems, points out, p. 77, “In the final analysis, we cannot claim familiarity with Gaunt.” Also see, Adams, pp. 134–35, who emphasizes the contractual, arranged character of Gaunt’s marriage to Blanche.
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© 2007 Holly A. Crocker
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Crocker, H.A. (2007). “My First Matere I Wil Yow Telle”: Visual Impact in the Book of the Duchess. In: Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604926_4
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