Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception

Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is the first comprehensive book-length study of Chaucer’s earliest major narrative poem and its reception. It provides a rigorous and critically balanced assimilation of the Book of the Duchess, the story of its reception and dissemination, and the major trends in its interpretive history. Focusing on the construction and value of the Book of the Duchess as a book, Jamie C. Fumo explores Chaucer’s concern with acts of writing and the textual mediation of experience. At the same time, Fumo places Chaucer’s poem within the context of his era’s broader concerns with authority, reading practices, and the vernacular.