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Notes Chapter 1: Introduction 1. The quoted line that begins this chapter is the famous opening sentence of Francis Bacon’s essay “On Truth,” also quoted by David Lawton (1985, 31) in connection with Chaucer’s Pardoner. Bacon was perhaps inspired by Chaucer’s reference to Pilate’s words in Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, where Christ’s silence may indicate a refusal to admonish Pilate, for “No man is al trewe” (4). Boethius explicitly names “love” as the fundamental harmony of the universe and everything in it (II.m.8.13–16). For Chaucer’s translation of this passage, see note 6 to chapter 3. All quotations of Chaucer’s prose and poetry throughout this book, unless otherwise noted, are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (1987), abbreviated Riv Ch. 2. Chaucer may never have heard the name Ockham, much less been influenced by him. Nevertheless, the litany of natural forces that constitute “love” in Boethius’s and Chaucer’s lexicon implies agreement with Ockham’s philosophy, for which see Spade 1994, including a translation of d. 2, qq. 4–8. 3. Quotations of Dream of the Rood are from The Vercelli Book; see Krapp 1932, 61–65. Chapter 2: Book of the Duchess 1. Very little certainty informs the dating of Chaucer’s individual poems. Nevertheless the current consensus assumes that the Legend of Good Women is “a product of Chaucer’s artistic maturity, written not long after . . . Troilus and Criseyde” (Riv Ch 587). The Retraction to the Canterbury Tales, containing a very complete bibliography of Chaucer’s major works, including “the book of the Duchesse” (CT X.1086), must have been written near the end of Chaucer’s life. 2. For a fuller, and certainly wittier, discussion of the poem’s titles, see Steve Ellis (1995) who argues for a restoration of what he says was “Chaucer’s own title: the Death of Blanche the Duchess” (257). 3. In the Oxford Guides to Chaucer, in Minnis’s The Shorter Poems (1995), the chapter on the Book of the Duchess begins with a discussion of the sincerity and affection of marital love among royals in the fourteenth century, with moving references to Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb,” and with particular emphasis on the marriage of Gaunt and Blanche. The first connection between this marriage and Gaunt’s presence as the man in black in Chaucer’s poem occurs five pages into this discussion, in a subordinate clause, as a fact not open to question: “Gaunt’s best side is presented to the beholder: here is one who is 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” (77). 4. See the thorough discussion of the relationship among the texts in Helen Phillips ’s 1982 edition, 65–66, as well as two discussions by N. F. Blake (1981, 1986) arising from a consideration of the authenticity of lines 31–96, which appear only in Thynne’s edition of 1532. 5. Edwards 1989, 65–66. The wording of this quoted passage may give the erroneous impression that John of Gaunt was Chaucer’s patron at the time of Blanche’s death in 1368. But there is no evidence that Chaucer came under even the partial patronage of Gaunt until 1374 at the earliest. The little evidence available suggests Chaucer was continuously in the household of Edward III and, while she lived, Queen Philippa from 1367 through the spring of 1374. 6. If Chaucer is using “fantasy” here as the Greeks understood φαντασµα (cog. fantasm, i.e., L. visum), corresponding to the fifth of Macrobius’s five types of dream, the apparition, then the main difference between “fantasy” and “ymagynacioun” is that the former “comes upon one in the moment between wakefulness and slumber” (Stahl 1952, 88), whereas the latter is not associated with dreaming. The nightmare and the apparition (the fourth and fifth types of dream) were not worth interpreting , according to Macrobius (I.iii), since they have no prophetic value. By contrast, the first three types, the enigmatic dream (somnium), the prophetic vision (visio), and the oracular dream (oraculum), were thought to foretell the future, at least in part. 7. J. J. Anderson calls attention to the terms of a similar dichotomy, though giving them different names, “doer” and “thinker” in one place, “experience” and “authority ” immediately thereafter (1992, 220). Suggesting that...

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