The Inheritor And Innovator

As Chaucer’s first important work, The Book of the Duchess marks the beginning ofChaucer’s literary career and stands as one of the earliest Courtly Love poems written inEnglish. However, due to its immaturity, it has gained little recognition from critics and iscommonly viewed as the background of Chaucer’s later masterpiece The Canterbury Tales.This thesis tries to reappraise The Book of the Duchess and draw attention to its value byexamining its inheritance from medieval literary conventions and its originality. In TheBook of the Duchess, Chaucer borrows freely from French Courtly Love and Dream Visionconvention and combines them with his Englishness and long-time experience in Englishcourt, making it the first real courtly poem in English. Meanwhile, Chaucer transcendsthese literary conventions and manifests high originality. In The Book of the Duchess,Chaucer shows great narrative strategy, using juxtapositions and contrasts to present hischaracters. In addition, The Book of the Duchess casts away the conventional Christianityconsolation pattern and manifests Chaucer’s early realism and humanism spirit. Moreover,Chaucer shows great rhetoric art in The Book of the Duchess, enriching the Englishlanguage with his romance vocabulary and diverse language styles. As Chaucer’s firstimportant work, The Book of the Duchess has significant influence on his later writings.The themes and artistic techniques in The Book of the Duchess continue to develop andreach maturity in The Canterbury Tales, rendering it the first and one of the greatestrealistic works ever written in the English language.